ne of them; and he observed to the emperor,
that nothing could be more useful to him than that the people should be
perpetually occupied with the _squabbles_ between him and Bathyllus! The
advice was accepted, and the emperor was silenced.

The parti-coloured hero, with every part of his dress, has been drawn
out of the great wardrobe of antiquity: he was a Roman Mime. HARLEQUIN
is described with his shaven head, _rasis capitibus_; his sooty face,
_fuligine faciem obducti_; his flat, unshod feet, _planipedes_; and his
patched coat of many colours, _Mimi centunculo_.[36] Even
_Pullicinella_, whom we familiarly call PUNCH, may receive, like other
personages of not greater 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.[37]

The genealogy of the whole family is confirmed by the general term,
which includes them all; for our _Zany_, in Italian _Zanni_, comes
direct from _Sannio_, a buffoon: 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."[38]

These are the two ancient heroes of pantomime. The other characters are
the laughing children of mere modern humour. Each of these chimerical
personages, like so many county members, come from different provinces
in the gesticulating land of pantomime; in little principalities the
rival inhabitants present a contrast in manners and characters which
opens a wider field for ridicule and satire than in a kingdom where an
uniformity of government will produce an uniformity of manners. An
inventor appeared in Ruzzante, an author and actor who flourished about
1530. Till his time they h