Goldoni. And I am very far from disparaging the Burattini, which have
great and peculiar merits, not the least of which is the art of drawing
the most delighted, dirty, and picturesque audiences. Like most of the
Marionette, they converse vicariously in the Venetian dialect, and have
such a rapidity of utterance that it is difficult to follow them. I only
remember to have made out one of their comedies,--a play in which an
ingenious lover procured his rich and successful rival to be arrested for
lunacy, and married the disputed young person while the other was raging
in the mad-house. This play is performed to enthusiastic audiences; but
for the most part the favorite drama of the Burattini appears to be a
sardonic farce, in which the chief character--a puppet ten inches high,
with a fixed and staring expression of Mephistophelean good-nature and
wickedness--deludes other and weak-minded puppets into trusting him, and
then beats them with a club upon the back of the head until they die. The
murders of this infamous creature, which are always executed in a spirit
of jocose _sang-froid_, and accompanied by humorous remarks, are
received with the keenest relish by the spectators and, indeed, the action
is every way worthy of applause. The dramatic spirit of the Italian race
seems to communicate itself to the puppets, and they perform their parts
with a fidelity to theatrical unnaturalness which is wonderful. I have
witnessed death agonies on these little stages which the great American
tragedian himself (whoever he may happen to be) could not surpass in
degree of energy. And then the Burattini deserve the greater credit
because they are agitated by the legs from below the scene, and not
managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette Theatre. Their
audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and comprise: first, boys
ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size; then weak little girls,
supporting immense weight of babies; then Austrian soldiers, with long
coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat sailors; a transient Greek or
Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced, statuesque, with the drapery of their