Columbus conceives a thought, his frail pinnaces pierce their perilous way over the ocean, and a new world is discovered. Louis Napoleon is taken from teaching French for a livelihood in New York to be throned in the palace of the Tuileries and to inaugurate the _Exposition Universelle_ surrounded by the leading monarchs of the earth. The young Rachel, haggard and ill clad, begged an influential person to obtain leave for her to appear on the stage of the Théâtre Français. He told her to get a basket and sell flowers. When she did appear, and heaps of bouquets were thrown at her feet, after the curtain fell she flung them all into a basket, slung it from her shoulders, and, kneeling to the man who had advised her to go and sell flowers, asked him, half in smiles and half in tears, if he would not buy a nosegay. Nothing that befalls the glittering Harlequin or Columbine amidst the swift enchantments of the theatre is fuller of astounding contrasts than these realities, if our thought but escapes the tyranny of space and time. An artifice of vast power by which the theatre intensifies its revelations of character and experience, conduct and destiny, so as to make them more effective and apparently more significant than the original realities themselves are in actual life, is by increasing the range and vividness of the standards and foils by which they are judged, carrying them lower and raising them higher and making their contrasts sharper than they are seen elsewhere. The fool used to have the head of his stick or mock sceptre painted with human features, and talk and play with it as if it were an intelligent comrade. This was his bauble, in allusion to which Shakspeare says, “The fool holds his bauble for a god.” Scoggan, the famous mummer, used to dress up his fists and make them act for the amusement of a dinner company. This is the secret of the vulgar delight in the clown, with his ridiculous dress made up of absurdities, his face whitened with chalk and flour and blotched with red patches and black and yellow streaks, his lips painted in elongations so that when he laughs his mouth seems to open from ear to ear. The mental disparity of his standard of intelligence and manners with that in the minds of the spectators elicits roars of coarse joy from them. It was said of Mazurier, the great Punchinello, that he was in deformities what Apollo was in perfections. Humped equally before and behind, perched on the legs of a heron, equipped with the arms of an ape, he moved with that stiffness without force, that suppleness devoid of reaction, characterizing the play of a body which has not in itself the principle of its movement, and whose members, set in action by a wire, are not attached to the trunk by articulations, but by rags. He imitated mechanism with as close a fidelity as in another rôle mechanism is made to imitate man. He seemed to be human and yet to have nothing human.