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simplicity. We are not quite sure that the dog is genuine,-but that may be tolerated. There are a great many societies formed amongst us for reviving things which the world had unwisely agreed to forget; and we are not without our hopes that there may be room for an association that would restore us the genuine puppet-show. It is an objection, however, that there is not much left of the black-letter literature of the puppets. Punch in his present shape is probably Italian. From Italy come the puppets that perform the most diverting antics upon a board, to the sound of pipe and drum. But these were once genuine English. We have put together in our engraving the exhibitor of dancing dolls, such as he is represented in Hogarth's 'Southwark Fair,' and the Italian stroller of our own day. Mr. Smith, the late keeper of the prints in the British Museum, complains, in his Cries of London,' that the streets are infested with these Italian boys; and yet he gives us a most spirited etching of one of them. Mr. Smith thought it necessary to be solemn and sarcastic when he had pen in hand; and in that curious farrago Nollekens and his Times,' he is perfectly scandalized that the old sculptor enjoyed Punch. He gravely adds, this gratification, however, our sculptor did not stand alone; for I have frequently seen, when I have stood in the crowd, wise men laugh at the mere squeaking of Punch, and have heard them speak of his cunning pranks with the highest ecstasy." We are glad to find, upon such grave testimony, that the race of wise men is not extinct.

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We have some fears that the immigration of Italian boys is declining. We do not see the monkey and the white mice so often as we could wish to do. The ape-bearer is a personage of high antiquity. We have the ape on shoulder in a manuscript three hundred years earlier than the date of him who is

"Led captive still in chain

Till he renounce the Pope and Spain."

Let us cleave to old customs. What if the monkey of the streets be but a monkey, and his keeper know nothing of the peculiarities which distinguish the many families of his race! What if he be but the commonest of monkeys! Is he not amusing? Does he not come with a new idea into our crowded thoroughfares, of distant lands where all is not labour and traffic-where "a wilderness

of monkeys" sit in the green trees, and throw down the fruit to the happy savages below? And then these Italian boys themselves, with their olive cheeks and white teeth-they are something different from your true London boy of the streets, with his mingled look of cunning and insolence. They will show you their treasures with a thorough conviction that they are giving you pleasure; and if you deny the halfpenny, they have still a smile and a bon jour—for they all know that French is a more current coin than their own dialect. We fear the police is hard upon them. We would put in a word for them, in the same spirit of humanity with which our delightful Elia pleaded for the beggars. They, by the way, were amongst the street sights, and we may well be glad to have an opportunity for such quotation:

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The mendicants of this great city were so many of her sights—her lions; I can no more spare them than I could the cries of London. No corner of a street is complete without them. They are as indispensable as the ballad singer; and, in their picturesque attire, as ornamental as the signs of old London. They were the standing morals, emblems, mementos, dial mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children, the salutary checks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry—

"Look

Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there."

Above all, those old blind Tobits that used to line the wall of Lincoln's Inn Garden, before modern fastidiousness had expelled them, casting up their ruined orbs to catch a ray of pity, and (if possible) of light, with their faithful dogguide at their feet;-whither are they fled? or into what corners, blind as themselves, have they been driven, out of the wholesome air and sun-warmth? * These dim eyes have in vain explored, for some months past, a well-known figure, or part of the figure, of a man who used to glide his comely upper-half over the pavements of London, wheeling along with most ingenious celerity upon a machine of wood—a spectacle to natives, to foreigners, and to children. He was of a robust make, with a florid sailor-like complexion, and his head was bare to the storm and sunshine. He was a natural curiosity-a speculation to the scientific-a prodigy to the simple. The infant would stare at the mighty man brought down to his own level. The common cripple would despise his own pusillanimity, viewing the hale stoutness and mighty heart of this half-limbed giant. Few but must have noticed him: for the accident which brought him low took place during the riots of 1780, and he has been a groundling so long. He seemed earth-born-an Antæus-and to suck in fresh vigour from the soil which he neighboured. He was a grand fragment—as good as an Elgin marble. The nature which should have recruited his reft legs and thighs was not lost, but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules. I heard a tremendous voice thundering and growling, as before an earthquake,-and casting down my eyes, it was this mandrake reviling a steed that had started at his portentous appearance. He seemed to want but his just stature to have rent the offending quadruped in shivers. He was as the man-part of a centaur, from which the horse-half had been cloven in dire Lapithan controversy. He moved on as if he could have made shift with the yet half body-portion which was left him. The os sublime was not wanting; and he threw out yet a jolly countenance upon the

heavens. Forty-and-two years had he driven this out-of-door trade, and now that his hair is grizzled in the service, but his good spirits no way impaired, because he is not content to exchange his free air and exercise for the restraints of a poor-house, he is expiating his contumacy in one of those houses (ironically christened) of correction. Was a daily spectacle like this to be deemed a nuisance which called for legal interference to remove? or not rather salutary, and a touching object, to the passers-by in a great city? Among her shows, her museums, and supplies for ever-gaping curiosity-(and what else but an accumulation of sights-endless sights-is a great city, or for what else is it desirable?)-was there not room for one Lusus (not Naturæ, indeed, but) Accidentium ?"

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Here is an engraving of a raree-show man a hundred and fifty years ago. In that box he has stores for the curious, such as the more ancient showman bore about-for that grotesque old fellow was once a modern. In 'The Alchymist,' the master of the servant who has filled the house with searchers for the philosopher's stone speculates thus:

And he adds

"What should my knave advance

To draw this company? he hung out no banners

Of a strange calf with five legs to be seen,

Or a huge lobster with six claws?"

"May be, he has the fleas that run at tilt Upon a table."

Tempest's raree-show man (Caulfield tells us he was known by the name of Old Harry) had the fleas that run at tilt ;" and he had also a tame hedgehog and a wonderful snake. Not many years ago "the industrious fleas" were exhibited as proper examples to the rising generation. Nor ought the wise and the learned to laugh at these things. If the industry of the fleas be somewhat questionable, there can be no doubt that their instructor had been sufficiently laborious. They say that dancing-bears are made by setting the poor animals upon a heated iron floor; but the habit is retained through that wonderful

power

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of discipline by which the eye and the voice of man become supreme over the inferior animals. There must have been a thorough inter-communication of ideas between the lords of the creation and the baboon that played on the guitar -the ape that beat his master at chess in the presence of the King of Portugalthe elephant which Bishop Burnet saw play at ball-and the hare which beat the tabor at Bartholomew Fair. Our ancestors delighted in such street sights, and not unwisely so. In the age of Elizabeth and James new countries had been explored; travelling to far distant lands had become common; and thus, he that brought home" a dead Indian" or "a strange fish" was sure to be rewarded. "Were I in England now (as once I was), and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver; there would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." So learned Trinculo, in the Tempest,' reprehends our countrymen. But they were not far wrong, if wrong at all. To see these wonders disabused them of many erroneous notions; and if their credulity was sometimes stimulated, their general stock of knowledge was increased. It was believed up to the middle of the seventeenth century that the elephant had no joints in its legs, and that it never lay down. An elephant was shown about kneeling and lying down, and the belief vanished. Sir Thomas Brown wishes for more such street sights, lest the error should revive in the next generation. Exhibitions of docility, such as elephants offer to us, are good for the multitude. A due appreciation of what may be effected by the combination of perseverance in man and of sagacity in a brute indicates a philosophical spirit in a people. Banks's horse was the great wonder of Elizabeth's time. He and his master have even found a niche in Raleigh's History of the World: '-" If Banks had lived in older times, he would have shamed all the enchanters in the world; for whosoever was most famous among them could never master or instruct any beast as he did." This famous animal was a bay gelding, and he was named Morocco. Here is his picture,

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In Love's Labour's Lost,' preserved also for the admiration of all ages. Moth, puzzling Armado with his arithmetic, says, "The Dancing Horse will tell you." Hall, in his Satires,' notices

"Strange Morocco's dumb arithmetic."

Sir Kenelm Digby informs us that Banks's horse "would restore a glove to the due owner after the master had whispered the man's name in his ear; and would tell the just number of pence in any piece of silver coin, newly showed him by his master." The Sieur de Melleray, in the notes to his translation of the Golden Ass' of Apuleius, tells us that he saw this wonderful horse in the Rue St. Jacques at Paris; and he is astonished that the animal could tell how many francs there were in a crown, but his astonishment was measureless that, the crown being then of a depreciated currency, the horse should be able to tell the exact amount of the depreciation, in that same month of March, 1608. Banks had fallen among a people who did not quite understand how far the animal and his keeper might employ the language of signs; and he got into trouble accordingly. The better instructed English multitude had been familiar with "Holden's camel," famed for "ingenuous studies;" and they had seen Morocco himself go up to the top of St. Paul's. Though they lived in an age of belief in wizards, they had no desire to burn Banks as a professor of the black art. But he had a narrow escape in France; and his contrivance for the justification of his horse's character and his own shows him to have been as familiar with the human as with the brute nature. The story is told by Bishop Morton :-" Which bringeth into my remembrance a story which Banks told me at Frankfort, from his own experience in France among the Capuchins, by whom he was brought into suspicion of magic, because of the strange feats which his horse Morocco played (as I take it) at Orleans, where he, to redeem his credit, promised to manifest to the world that his horse was nothing less than a devil. To this end he commanded his horse to seek out one in the press of the people who had a crucifix on his hat; which done, he bade him kneel down unto it; and not this only, but also to rise up again and to kiss it. And now, gentlemen (quoth he), I think my horse hath acquitted both me and himself;' and so his adversaries rested satisfied; conceiving (as it might seem) that the devil had no power to come near the cross.' The people of Orleans were imperfectly civilized; but Banks and Morocco were destined to fall into barbarous hands. We have no precise record of his fate; but some humorous lines of Jonson have been accepted as containing a tragical truth:

"But 'mongst these Tiberts*, who do you think there was?

Old Banks the juggler, our Pythagoras,

Grave tutor to the learned horse; both which,

Being, beyond sea, burned for one witch,

Their spirits transmigrated to a cat."

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It appears to us that Banks's horse, and Holden's camel, and the elephant that expressed his anger when the King of Spain was named, must have had a considerable influence in repressing the bear-baiting cruelties of that age. These were among the street sights sanctioned by royal authority. The patent to Henslowe and Alleyn, the players, constituting them "Masters of the King's

* Cats.

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