The puppets went down in the general hurricane of the Revolution, and they only partially came again to the surface. To their ancient shows on the Boulevard du Temple has succeeded a line of theatres; and the chief resulting difference is, that very awkward men and women now enact the most sacred subjects where puppets once did the same office less revoltingly. If a popular movement finally declared that the puppet dynasty had ceased to reign, it was a despotic will that abolished the use of such effigies in church spectacles. Louis XIV., on witnessing one of those sights at Dieppe, was so shocked thereat that he ordered their general suppression. The French word for puppet, _Marionnette_, applied originally only to figures of the Virgin Mary; but, like the _Catrinette_ of the little Savoyard, it has ceased to have an exclusive application. With regard to puppets in England, those wooden ladies and gentlemen once figured largely in our church-shows, interludes, and pageants. The names of the puppet masters have come down to us, from Pad, Cookley, Powell, and the _daughter_ of Colley Cibber, to no less a man than Curran, who, taking upon himself, in sport, the charge of a show for one night, found it so easy when speaking for the mute actors to maintain both sides of an argument that he was _therefore_ convinced of his excellent aptitude for the law. Pepys, as usual, affords us again illustrations of the fashion which attached to puppets in his day. From his brief journalizing we obtain a world of information on this matter. Thus we find him recording:—“12th Nov. 1661. My wife and I to Bartholomew Fayre, with puppets (which I had seen once before, and the play without puppets often); but though I love the play as much as ever I did, yet I do not like the puppets at all, but think it to be a lessening of it.” On the 9th May, in the following year, we find him in Covent Garden, “to see an Italian puppet-play, that is within the rayles there,—the best that ever I saw, and great resort of gallants.” In a fortnight he takes poor Mrs. Pepys to the same play. In October, he says:—“Lord Sandwich is at Whitehall, with the King, before whom the puppet-plays I saw this summer in Covent Garden are acted this night.” On the 30th August, 1667, being with a merry party at Walthamstow, he left his wife to get home as well as she could; _he_ “to Bartholomew Fayre, to walk up and down, and there, among other things, find my Lady Castlemaine at a puppet-play, ‘Patient Grizell,’ and the street full of people expecting her coming out. I confess I did wonder at her courage to come abroad, thinking the people would abuse her; but they, silly people, do not know the work she makes; and therefore suffered her with great respect to take coach, and so away without any trouble at all.”