The actors are indifferent; and though they
sometimes represent one of Goldoni's comedies, the staple of the
Drama is French. Anything like nationality is dangerous to
despotic governments, and Jesuit-beleaguered kings.
The Theatre of Puppets, or Marionetti--a famous company from Milan-
-is, without any exception, the drollest exhibition I ever beheld
in my life. I never saw anything so exquisitely ridiculous. They
LOOK between four and five feet high, but are really much smaller;
for when a musician in the orchestra happens to put his hat on the
stage, it becomes alarmingly gigantic, and almost blots out an
actor. They usually play a comedy, and a ballet. The comic man in
the comedy I saw one summer night, is a waiter in an hotel. There
never was such a locomotive actor, since the world began. Great
pains are taken with him. He has extra joints in his legs: and a
practical eye, with which he winks at the pit, in a manner that is
absolutely insupportable to a stranger, but which the initiated
audience, mainly composed of the common people, receive (so they do
everything else) quite as a matter of course, and as if he were a
man.
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