As may have been surmised, we got our Punch and Judy by way of France, but as a human actor Punch himself came direct to England. [Illustration: FIG. 151.--An ancient bronze statuette with the face and features of Punch (after Ficorroni).] An ancient statuette which is figured by Ficorroni (see Figure 151) is supposed by antiquarians to represent Punch, and if the individual whom it represents did not go by that name, he must certainly have been one of Punch's ancestors, for the likeness to our modern hero is exceedingly great. References are made by a number of classical authors to puppet-shows, and these were also known in China as long ago as a thousand years before the Christian era. [Illustration: FIG. 152.--A fourteenth-century puppet-show (from the MS. of the "Roman d'Alexandre").] The method also of exhibiting the puppets is not very modern, for a very interesting figure of a show embellishes the celebrated MS. of the "Roman d'Alexandre" (see Figure 152) which is preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and was executed between the years 1338 and 1344. The figures were evidently worked by the hands as in Punch and Judy, and that it was intended to amuse children is shown by three little girls who are represented as looking on. Though sticks are not strictly a part of dress, unless we consider the canes of the dandies as being so, yet their usefulness in puppet-shows is so great that we are tempted to digress for a moment to give the comments of M. Lemercier de Neuville on the subject:-- "The stick! that is the great argument of Guignol, as well as of Polichinelle. The stick settles everything. It puts an end to disputes, it pays debts, it sends away troublesome people, it disciplines wives, it takes vengeance on men, it is the 'Deus ex machina' of all this Lilliputian world. What a marvellous dramatic resource it is. If a situation becomes difficult to manage, settle it with a blow of the stick. If a _dénouement_ seems to hang fire, hasten its progress by a thrashing. The stick is above all criticism; it checkmates it, it destroys it, for it is in the right, in spite of everybody, because it is the strongest. The stick has no respect of persons. With it Guignol beats his creditors, his friends, his wife, the constable, the judge, the hangman, and the more he strikes the more he makes people laugh. There is no spoken joke that is as good as this. And yet the stick is not beautiful, nor is it new. One sees that it has done duty for a long time, for it is worn out and cracked." We have, in fact, a record of Italian players coming to act their farces in this country in 1577, but as Punch in the capacity of a person is now obsolete with us, we shall only incidentally refer to him as a living actor, though perhaps we might recall the fact that Molière introduced him into his play _Le Malade Imaginaire_.