The negro minstrel will give up his tambourine, for it is as old as the days of the Exodus, when Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances; and he will give up the bones, for Miss Olive Logan, in _Harper's Magazine_ for April, 1879, traces them back to the reign of Fou Hi, Emperor of China, 3468 B.C., while Shakspere's King of the Fairies, who made an ass of the hard-handed man of Athens, also treated Bottom to the melody of the bones. He will hang up his fiddle and his bow when the time comes, cheerfully enough, for Nero, according to tradition, fiddled for the dancing of the flames that consumed Rome nineteen hundred years ago. None of these are exclusively his own; but it would be very cruel to take from him his banjo, which he evolved if he did not invent, and without which he can be and can do nothing. ACT III. THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE. THE AMERICAN BURLESQUE. "The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them." _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, Act v. Sc. 1. The burlesque among serious writers has a bad reputation. George Eliot, in _Theophrastus Such_, says that it debases the moral currency; and George Crabb, in his _English Synonymes_, thus dismisses it: "Satire and irony are the most ill-natured kinds of wit; burlesque stands in the lowest rank." Burlesque, from the Italian _burlare_, "to joke," "to banter," "to play," has been defined as "an expression of language, a display of gesture, an impression of countenance, the intention being to excite laughter." In art caricature is burlesque, in literature parody is burlesque, in the drama comic pantomime, comic opera, travesty, and extravaganza are burlesque. All dramatic burlesque ranges under the head of farce, although all farce is not burlesque. Burlesque is the farce of portraiture on the stage; farce on the stage is the burlesque of events. Bret Harte's _Condensed Novels_ and George Arnold's _McArone Papers_ are representative specimens of burlesque in American letters; Arthur B. Frost's famous domestic cat, who supped inadvertently upon rat poison, is an excellent example of burlesque in American art. What America has done for burlesque on the stage it is the aim of the following pages to show.