has also written, with equal curiosity and value, the history of PUPPET-SHOWS. But whom has he lauded? whom has he placed paramount, above all other people, for their genius of invention in improving this art?--The English! and the glory which has hitherto been universally conceded to the Italian nation themselves, appears to belong to us! For we, it appears, while others were dandling and pulling their little representatives of human nature into such awkward and unnatural motions, first invented pulleys, or wires, and gave a fine and natural action to the artificial life of these gesticulating machines!

We seem to know little of ourselves as connected with the history of puppet-shows; but in an article in the curious Dictionary of Trevoux, I find that John Brioché, to whom had been attributed the invention of Marionettes, is only to be considered as an improver; in his time (but the learned writers supply no date,) an Englishman discovered the secret of moving them by springs, and without strings; but the Marionettes of Brioché were preferred for the pleasantries which he made them deliver. The

erudite QUADRIO appears to have more successfully substantiated our claims to the pulleys or wires, or springs of the puppets, than any of our own antiquaries; and perhaps the uncommemorated name of this Englishman was that Powell, whose Solomon and Sheba were celebrated in the days of Addison and Steele; the former of whom has composed a classical and sportive Latin poem on this very subject. But QUADRIO might well rest satisfied, that the nation, which could boast of its Fantoccini, surpassed, and must ever surpass the puny efforts of all doll-loving people!

365

"POLITICAL RELIGIONISM."

IN Professor Dugald Stewart's first Dissertation on the Progress of Philosophy, I find this singular and significant term. It has occasioned me to reflect on those contests for religion, in which a particular faith has been made the ostensible pretext, while the secret motive was usually political. The historians, who view in these religious wars only religion itself, have written large volumes, in which we may never discover that they have either been a struggle to obtain predominance, or an expedient to secure it. The hatreds of ambitious men have disguised their own purposes, while Christianity has borne the odium of loosening a destroying spirit among mankind; which, had Christianity never existed, would have equally prevailed in human affairs. Of a moral malady, it is not only necessary to know the nature, but to designate it by a right name, that we may not err in our mode of treatment. If we call that religion which we shall find for the greater part is political, we are likely to be mistaken in the regimen and the cure.

Fox, in his " Acts and Monuments," writes the martyrology of the protestants in three mighty folios; where, in the third," the tender mercies" of the catholics are "cut in wood" for those who might not otherwise be enabled to read or spell them. Such pictures are abridgments of long narratives, but they leave in the mind a fulness of horror. Fox made more than one generation shudder; and his volume, particularly this third, chained to a reading-desk in the halls of the great, and in the aisles of churches, often detained the loiterer, as it furnished some new scene of papistical horrors to paint forth on returning to his fireside. The protestants were then the martyrs, because, under Mary, the protestants had been thrown out of power.

DODD has opposed to Fox three curious folios, which he calls "The Church History of England," exhibiting a most abundant martyrology of the catholics, inflicted by the hands of the protestants; who in the succeeding reign of Elizabeth, after long trepidations and balancings, were confirmed into power. He grieves over the delusion and seduction of the black-letter romance of honest John Fox, which, he says, "has obtained

a place in protestant churches next to the Bible, while John Fox himself is esteemed little less than an evangelist." DODD's narratives are not less pathetic; for the situation of the catholic, who had to secrete himself, as well as to suffer, was more adapted for romantic adventures than even the melancholy but monotonous story of the protestants tortured in the cell, or bound to the stake. These catholics, however, were attempting all sorts of intrigues; and the saints and martyrs of DODD to the parliament of England were only traitors and conspirators!

HEYLIN, in his history of the Puritans and the Presbyterians, blackens them for political devils. He is the Spagnolet of history, delighting himself with horrors at which the painter himself must have started. He tells of their " oppositions" to monarchical and episcopal government; their "innovations" in the church; and their " embroilments" of the kingdoms. The sword rages in their hands; treason, sacrilege, plunder; while "more of the blood of Englishmen had poured like water within the space of four years, than had been shed in the civil wars of York and Lancaster in four centuries!"