Ursus was the poet of these magical representations; he wrote the pieces.  He had a diversity of talents; he was clever at sleight of hand.  Besides the voices he imitated, he produced all sorts of unexpected things—­shocks of light and darkness; spontaneous formations of figures or words, as he willed, on the partition; vanishing figures in chiaroscuro; strange things, amidst which he seemed to meditate, unmindful of the crowd who marvelled at him.

One day Gwynplaine said to him,—­

“Father, you look like a sorcerer!”

And Ursus replied,—­

“Then I look, perhaps, like what I am.”

The Green Box, built on a clear model of Ursus’s, contained this refinement of ingenuity—­that between the fore and hind wheels the central panel of the left side turned on hinges by the aid of chains and pulleys, and could be let down at will like a drawbridge.  As it dropped it set at liberty three legs on hinges, which supported the panel when let down, and which placed themselves straight on the ground like the legs of a table, and supported it above the earth like a platform.  This exposed the stage, which was thus enlarged by the platform in front.

This opening looked for all the world like a “mouth of hell,” in the words of the itinerant Puritan preachers, who turned away from it with horror.  It was, perhaps, for some such pious invention that Solon kicked out Thespis.

For all that Thespis has lasted much longer than is generally believed.  The travelling theatre is still in existence.  It was on those stages on wheels that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they performed in England the ballets and dances of Amner and Pilkington; in France, the pastorals of Gilbert Colin; in Flanders, at the annual fairs, the double choruses of Clement, called Non Papa; in Germany, the “Adam and Eve” of Theiles; and, in Italy, the Venetian exhibitions of Animuccia and of Cafossis, the “Silvae” of Gesualdo, the “Prince of Venosa,” the “Satyr” of Laura Guidiccioni, the “Despair of Philene,” the “Death of Ugolina,” by Vincent Galileo, father of the astronomer, which Vincent Galileo sang his own music, and accompanied himself on his viol de gamba; as well as all the first attempts of the Italian opera which, from 1580, substituted free inspiration for the madrigal style.

The chariot, of the colour of hope, which carried Ursus, Gwynplaine, and their fortunes, and in front of which Fibi and Vinos trumpeted like figures of Fame, played its part of this grand Bohemian and literary brotherhood.  Thespis would no more have disowned Ursus than Congrio would have disowned Gwynplaine.

Arrived at open spaces in towns or villages, Ursus, in the intervals between the too-tooing of Fibi and Vinos, gave instructive revelations as to the trumpetings.

“This symphony is Gregorian,” he would exclaim.  “Citizens and townsmen, the Gregorian form of worship, this great progress, is opposed in Italy to the Ambrosial ritual, and in Spain to the Mozarabic ceremonial, and has achieved its triumph over them with difficulty.”