Peter the Great kept a dwarf whom he used to call his puppet; and in 1710 he celebrated a marriage of two dwarfs at St. Petersburg with great ceremony, when he invited all his courtiers and the foreign ambassadors, and ordered that all dwarfs residing within 200 miles of his capital should be present. But some would not consent to come for fear of ridicule, an act of disobedience which Peter punished by compelling them to wait on the rest at dinner. For this miniature company “everything provided was suitable in size. A low table held small plates, dishes, glasses, and other necessary articles, diminished to the standard of the guests”--the banquet being followed by a dance, opened with a minuet by the bridegroom, who was three feet two inches high.[109] Marie Anne, wife of Philip IV. of Spain, having laughed once at the eccentric antics of a dwarf clown, was sternly reproved for her bad taste in so doing, upon which she sensibly replied that they should take the clown away if they did not mean her to laugh--so austere was Spanish etiquette. A favourite dwarf of Charles V. of Spain was Corneille, a portrait of whom, by Francesco Torbido, in the Louvre at Paris, represents him dressed as a knight, with his left hand resting on the back of a large dog; and Velasquez has painted some dwarfs which were once attached to the Spanish Court, “where the most ugly of such deformities were most valued.”[110] At Madrid there is a painting by this artist representing the Infanta Margarita with her two dwarfs, Maria Borbola and Nicolasico Pertusano, who are teasing a good-natured dog. Some years ago a dwarf named Don Francisco Hidalgo held his levees in the Cosmorama Rooms, Regent Street, having previously for eighteen years, it was stated, been attached to the Court of Madrid, in the reign of Ferdinand VII. The first wife of Joachim Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, assembled together a number of dwarfs of both sexes, in order to marry them with a view of multiplying their species--an experiment said to have been practised also by Catherine de Medicis, but in each case the attempt was fruitless. And at the castle of Ambras, in the Tyrol, was a wooden image, “only three spans high, representing a dwarf who lived in the Archduke Ferdinand’s Court.” From an early period dwarfs were kept in Turkish palaces, an amusing reference to this custom being given by Lord Byron, who, describing the Sultan’s palace in Turkey, says:-- “This massy portal stood at the wide close Of a huge hall, and on its either side Two little dwarfs, the least you could suppose, Were sate, like ugly imps, as if allied In mockery to the enormous gate which rose O’er them in almost pyramidic pride; The gate so splendid was in all its features, You never thought about those little creatures,