The puppets and "motions" alluded to in the foregoing description were beginning to be a very favourite spectacle, and none of the puppet plays of the period were more popular than the serio-comic drama of _Punch and Judy_, attributed to Silvio Florillo, an Italian comic dramatist of the time. According to the original version of the story, which has undergone various changes, some of which have been made within the memory of the existing generation, Punch, in a paroxysm of jealousy, destroys his infant child, upon which Judy, in revenge, belabours him with a cudgel. The exasperated hunchback seizes another stick, beats his wife to death, and throws from the window the two corpses, which attracts the notice of a constable, who enters the house to arrest the murderer. Punch flies, but is arrested by an officer of the Inquisition, and lodged in prison; but contrives to escape by bribing the gaoler. His subsequent encounters with a dog, a doctor, a skeleton, and a demon are said to be an allegory, intended to convey the triumph of humanity over ennui, disease, death, and the devil; but, as there is nothing allegorical in the former portion of the story, this seems doubtful. The allegory was soon lost sight of, if it was ever intended, and the latter part of the story has long been that which excites the most risibility. As usually represented in this country during the last fifty years, and probably for a much longer period, Punch does not bribe the gaoler, but evades execution for his crimes by strangling the hangman with his own noose. Who has not observed the delight, venting itself in screams of laughter, with which young and old witness the comical little wretch's fight with the constable, the wicked leer with which he induces the hangman to put his neck in the noose by way of instruction, and the impish chuckling in which he indulges while strangling his last victim? The crowd laughs at all this in the same spirit as the audience at a theatre applauds furiously while a policeman is bonneted and otherwise maltreated in a pantomime or burlesque. The tightness of the matrimonial noose, it is to be feared, materially influences the feeling with which the murder of a faithless wife is regarded by those whose poverty shuts out the prospect of divorce. And Punch is such a droll, diverting vagabond, that even those who have witnessed his crimes are irresistibly seduced into laughter by his grotesque antics and his cynical bursts of merriment, which render him such a strange combination of the demon and the buffoon. The earliest notices of the representation in London of 'Punch's Moral Drama,' as an old comic song calls it, occur in the overseer's books of St. Martin's in the Fields for 1666 and 1667, in which are four entries of sums, ranging from twenty-two shillings and sixpence to fifty-two shillings and sixpence, as "Rec. of Punchinello, ye Italian popet player, for his booth at Charing Cross."