been: The Ninety-nine Misfortunes of Facanapa; Arlecchino, the Sleeping
King; Facanapa as Soldier in Catalonia; The Capture of Smyrna, with
Facanapa and Arlecchino Slaves in Smyrna (this play being repeated several
nights); and, Arlecchino and Facanapa Hunting an Ass. If you can fancy
people going night after night to this puppet-drama, and enjoying it with
the keenest appetite, you will not only do something toward realizing to
yourself the easily-pleased Italian nature, but you will also suppose
great excellence in the theatrical management. For my own part, I find few
things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never tired of their
bewitching absurdity, their inevitable defects, their irresistible touches
of verisimilitude. At their theatre I have seen the relenting parent
(Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while Arlecchino, as the
large-hearted cobbler who has paid the house-rent of the erring son when
the prodigal was about to be cast into the street, looked on and rubbed
his hands with amiable satisfaction and the conventional delight in
benefaction which we all know. I have witnessed the base terrors of
Facanapa at an apparition, and I have beheld the keen spiritual agonies of
the Emperor Nicholas on hearing of the fall of Sebastopol. Not many
passages of real life have affected me as deeply as the atrocious behavior
of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when he responds to the
expostulations of his friend the Knight of Malta,--a puppet of shaky and
vacillating presence, but a soul of steel and rock:

"Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy dungeons? Remember, she is
thy brother's wife. Remember thine own honor. Think on the sacred name of
virtue." (Wrigglingly, and with a set countenance and gesticulations
toward the pit.)

To which the ferocious baron makes answer with a sneering laugh, "Honor?--
I know it not! Virtue?--I detest it!" and attempting to pass the knight,