It was then he
powerfully affected the audience by the eloquence of his action in the
tragic pantomime of Don Juan![34]
These pantomimi seem to have been held in great honour; many were
children of the Graces and the Virtues! The tragic and the comic masks
were among the ornaments of the sepulchral monuments of an archmime and
a pantomime. Montfaucon conjectures that they formed a select
fraternity.[35] They had such an influence over the Roman people, that
when two of them quarrelled, Augustus interfered to renew their
friendship. Pylades was one 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.
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