which he relates his various feats, enraptures the grovelling countrymen. He delights in licentious "double entendre," gross jokes, and dirty tricks; there is not a single good quality in him: his cunning is very low, and he is always outwitted when he meets with any person of sense, so that in the end he is generally discovered, imprisoned, whipped, and hanged. Such is the celebrated Policinella. There are many houses for puppet-shows, where, at any time of the day, one may go in for a few "grains," provided one's olfactory nerves are not too keen for the smell produced by the crowd of dirty fellows who resort to them. There are also ambulatory puppet-shows in the streets."[1]
It has been said, that "in England every thing intellectual advances by rapid strides;" and no more striking or convincing proof can be given of its truth than the change, especially of late years, which has occured in the character of Punch. In Italy, he has remained stationary: he is there now, what he was two hundred years ago; but here, he is no longer the blunt-headed booby, "always outwitted," represented in the preceding extract, but a personage in general far too clever for any of those with whom he has to deal: instead of being "discovered" and "hanged," he contrives to have his executioner, "trussed up" in his place; and finally, by the happy union of intellect and corporeal strength, defeats and destroys "man's greatest enemy," and becomes "the devil's butcher," when the fiend hoped to have had him "in fee-simple, with fine and recovery."
We cannot close the character of our hero without inserting a sonnet (and its coda, as the Italians call it,) in praise of Punch, by no less a man, if we are rightly- ↑ "Italy, and the Italians in the Nineteenth Century," chap. 1. The dress worn by Punch is represented hi one of Panelli's "Cinquanta Costumi Pittoreschi," Rome, 1816. It represents the performance of a puppet-show in the streets of Rome, exactly in the same way as they are exhibited in this country. In Naples, sometimes a third person stands on an elevation at the side, and explains, or "interprets," for the characters. Penelli makes Punch wear a black mask, like Harlequin.
