of all this funeral pomp--"Ten
million of sesterces!" On this he observed that if they would give him
but a hundred thousand they might throw his body into the Tiber.

The _Pantomimi_ were quite of a different class. They were tragic
actors, and usually mute; they combined the arts of gesture, music, and
dances of the most impressive character. Their silent language has often
drawn tears by the pathetic emotions they excited; "Their very nod
speaks, their hands talk, and their fingers have a voice," says one of
their admirers.

These Pantomimists seem to have been held in great honour. The tragic
and the comic masks were among the ornaments of the sepulchral monuments
of an _Archmime_ and a _Pantomimi_. Montfaucon conjectures that they
formed a select fraternity.

The parti-coloured hero (Harlequin), with every part of his dress, has
been drawn out of the greatest wardrobe of antiquity; he was a Roman
Mime. Harlequin is described with his shaven head (_rasis capitibus_);
his sooty face (_fuligine faciem abducti_); his flat unshod feet,
(_planipedes_), and his patched coat of many colours, (_Mimi
centunculo_). Even _Pulcinello_, whom we familiarly call "Punch," may
receive, like other personages of no great importance, all his dignity
from antiquity; one of his Roman ancestors having appeared to an
antiquary's visionary eye in a bronze statue; more than one erudite
dissertation authenticates the family likeness; the nose long, prominent
and hooked; the staring goggle eyes; the hump at his back, and at his
breast; in a word, all the character which so strongly marks the Punch
race, as distinctly as whole dynasties have been featured by the
Austrian lip and the Bourbon nose.

The genealogy of the whole family is confirmed by the general term which
includes them all: in English, Zany; in Italian, _Zanni_; in the Latin,
_Sannio_; and a passage in "Cicero _De Oratore_," paints Harlequin and
his brother gesticulators after the life; the perpetual trembling motion
of their limbs, their ludicrous and flexible gestures, and all the
mimicry of their faces: "_Quid enim potest tam ridiculum quam Sannio
esse? Qui ore vultu, imitandis motibus, voce, denique corpore ridetur
ipso._" Lib II., Sect. 51. ("For what has more of the ludicrous than
Sannio? Who, with his mouth, his face, imitating every motion with his
voice, and, indeed, with all his body, provokes laughter.")

The Latin Sannio was changed by the Italians into (as Ainsw