soldier excited great admiration as a prodigy of mechanism, by lighting his pipe and puffing smoke from his mouth. This feat was soon imported into France, and may be seen at the present day executed in great perfection at Seraphin’s theatre in the Palais Royal. The triviality, absurdity, and profanity that tarnished the German stage during the first half of the eighteenth century, were followed by a reaction in favour of better taste and common sense. Gottsched and Lessing gave the signal of the revival of art and poetry. The theatre resumed its importance; actors their proper place, from which they had been ousted by the intolerance of the consistories; puppets returned to the modest sphere which circumstances had permitted and encouraged them temporarily to quit, and resumed their old stock pieces, consisting of Biblical dramas and popular legends. Faust was exceedingly popular, and novelties were occasionally introduced. Lewis’s _Bravo of Venice_ was taken for the subject of a grand drama, performed by the Augsburg marionettes, which also played, with great success, a drama founded on the well-known story of Don Juan and his marble guest. And this brings us to the time when a boy, Wolfgang Goethe by name—kept at home by his parents during certain gloomy episodes of the Seven Years’ War, when Frankfort was occupied by the French—delighted his leisure with a marionette theatre, a Christmas gift from his grandfather, and so fostered his inborn dramatic taste and genius. In his memoirs, and in _Wilhelm Meister_, he tells us, in some charming passages, what pleasure he took in the management of his mimic comedians.