society the corner of the second generation, where the son mentions “my father” quickly, with a slight drop of the voice, out of a courteous disinclination to let filial respect become a bore to third parties. There is an academician of the second generation in Pailleron’s play who is always alluding to _mon illustre père_, and as the ill-natured say _joue du cadavre_. In our little English corner there is never any such lapse from good taste, Harry Irving was greatly loved there; and will be sadly missed. THE PUPPETS At the corner of a Bloomsbury square I found my path blocked by a little crowd of children who were watching a puppet show of an unusual kind. The usual kind, of course, is _Punch and Judy_, which has become a degenerate thing, with its puppets grasped in the operator’s hand; these puppets were wired, in the grand manner of the art, and had a horse and cart, no less, for their transport. The show, though lamentably poor in itself—the puppets merely danced solemnly round and round without any attempt at dramatic action—was rich in suggestion. Do we not all keep a warm corner of our hearts for the puppets, if only for their venerable antiquity and their choice literary associations? Why, in the grave pages of the _Literary Supplement_ learned archæologists have lately been corresponding about the Elizabethan “motions,” and Sir William Ridgeway has traced the puppets back to the Syracuse of Xenophon’s day, and told us how that author in his “Symposium” makes a famous Syracusan puppet player say that he esteems fools above other men because they are those who go to see his puppets (νευρόσπαστα). My own recollections connect Xenophon with parasangs rather than puppets, but I am glad to be made aware of this honourable pedigree, though I strongly resent the Syracusan’s remark about the amateurs of puppets. I share the taste of Partridge, who “loved a puppet show of all the pastimes upon earth,” and I sympathize with the showman in “Tom Jones” who could tolerate all religions save that of the Presbyterians, “because they were enemies to puppet shows.” And so I lingered with the children at the corner of the Bloomsbury square.