inting, cheap balderdash in
print--all that will do for the people. So they say now-a-days.

Was the bell tower yonder set in a ducal garden or in a public place?
Was Cimabue's masterpiece veiled in a palace or borne aloft through the
throngs of the streets?

* * *

A man, be he bramble or vine, likes to grow in the open air in his own
fashion; but a woman, be she flower or weed, always thinks she would be
better under glass. When she gets the glass she breaks it--generally;
but till she gets it she pines.

* * *

When they grew up in Italy, all that joyous band,--Arlecchino in
Bergamo, Stenterello in Florence, Pulcinello in Naples, Pantaleone in
Venice, Dulcamara in Bologna, Beltramo in Milan, Brighella in
Brescia--masked their mirthful visages and ran together and jumped on
that travelling stage before the world, what a force they were for the
world, those impudent mimes!

"Only Pantomimi?" When they joined hands with one another and rolled
their wandering house before St. Mark's they were only players indeed;
but their laughter blew out the fires of the Inquisition, their fools'
caps made the papal tiara look but paper toy, their wooden swords struck
to earth the steel of the nobles, their arrows of epigram, feathered
from goose and from falcon, slew, flying, the many-winged dragon of
Superstition.

They were old as the old Latin land, indeed.

They had mouldered for ages in Etruscan cities, with the dust of
uncounted centuries upon them, and been only led out in Carnival times,
pale, voiceless, frail ghosts of dead powers, whose very meaning the
people had long forgotten. But the trumpet-call of the Renaissance woke
them from their Rip Van Winkle sleep.

They got up, young again, and keen for every frolic--Barbarossas of sock
and buskin, whose helmets were caps and bells, breaking the magic spell
of their slumber to burst upon men afresh; buoyant incarnations of the
new-born scorn for tradition, of the nascent revolts of democracy, with
which the air was rife.

"Only Pantomimi?" Oh, altro!

The world when it reckons its saviours should rate high all it owed to
the Pantomimi,--the privileged Pantomimi--who first dared take license
to say in their quips and cranks, in their capers and jests, what had
sent all speakers before them to the rack and the faggots.

Who think of that when they hear the shrill squeak of Pulcinello in the
dark bye-streets of northern towns,