made so much a rage of the town that moralists and satirists protested, and the clergy preached against them.  A sermon preached against them by the Bishop of London, January 6th, 1724, led to an order that no more should take place than the six subscribed for at the beginning of the month.  Nevertheless they held their ground afterwards by connivance of the government.  In 1728, Heidegger was called in to nurse the Opera, which throve by his bold puffing.  He died, in 1749, at the age of 90, claiming chief honour to the Swiss for ingenuity.

‘I was born,’ he said, ’a Swiss, and came to England without a farthing, where I have found means to gain, L5000 a-year,—­and to spend it.  Now I defy the ablest Englishman to go to Switzerland and either gain that income or spend it there.’]

[Footnote 2:  The ‘History of Susanna’ had been an established puppet play for more than two generations.  An old copy of verses on Bartholomew Fair in the year 1665, describing the penny and twopenny puppet plays, or, as they had been called in and since Queen Elizabeth’s time, ‘motions,’ says

  “Their Sights are so rich, is able to bewitch
  The heart of a very fine man-a;
  Here’s ‘Patient Grisel’ here, and ‘Fair Rosamond’ there,
  And ‘the History of Susanna.’”

Pepys tells of the crowd waiting, in 1667, to see Lady Castlemaine come out from the puppet play of ‘Patient Grisel.’

The Powell mentioned in this essay was a deformed cripple whose Puppet-Show, called Punch’s Theatre, owed its pre-eminence to his own power of satire.  This he delivered chiefly through Punch, the clown of the puppets, who appeared in all plays with so little respect to dramatic rule that Steele in the Tatler (for May 17, 1709) represents a correspondent at Bath, telling how, of two ladies, Prudentia and Florimel, who would lead the fashion, Prudentia caused Eve in the Puppet-Show of ‘the Creation of the World’ to be

  ‘made the most like Florimel that ever was seen,’

and

  ’when we came to Noah’s Flood in the show, Punch and his wife were
  introduced dancing in the ark.’

Of the fanatics called French Prophets, who used to assemble in Moorfields in Queen Anne’s reign, Lord Chesterfield remembered that

’the then Ministry, who loved a little persecution well enough, was, however, so wise as not to disturb their madness, and only ordered one Powell, the master of a famous Puppet-Show, to make Punch turn Prophet; which he did so well, that it soon put an end to the prophets and their prophecies.  The obscure Dr Sacheverell’s fortune was made by a parliamentary prosecution’ (from Feb. 27 to March 23, 1709-10) ’much about the same time the French Prophets were totally extinguished by a Puppet-Show’

  (Misc.  Works, ed.  Maty., Vol.  II, p. 523, 555).

This was the Powell who played in Covent Garden during the time of week-day evening service, and who, taking up Addison’s joke against the opera from No. 5 of the ‘Spectator’, produced ‘Whittington and his Cat’ as a rival to ‘Rinaldo and Armida’. [See also a note to No. 31.]]