it much better had not the charms of Countess Ferris's conversation
engaged my mind, which would otherwise perhaps have been more seized on
than it _was_, by the sight of an old pantomime, or wretched farce (for
there was speaking in it, I remember), exploded long since from our very
lowest places of diversion, and now exhibited here at Padua before a
very polite and a very literary audience; and in a better theatre by far
than our newly-adorned opera-house in the Hay-market. Its subject was no
other than the birth of Harlequin; but the place and circumstances
combined to make me look on it in a light which shewed it to uncommon
advantage. The storm, for example, the thunder, darkness, &c. which is
so solemnly made to precede an incantation, apparently not meant to be
ridiculous, after which, a huge egg is somehow miraculously produced
upon the stage, put me in mind of the very old mythologists, who thus
desired to represent the chaotic state of things, when Night, Ocean, and
Tartarus disputed in perpetual confusion; till _Love_ and _Music_
separated the elements, and as Dryden says,

Then hot and cold, and moist and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And music's power obey.

For _Cupid_, advancing to a slow tune, steadies with his wand the
rolling mass upon the stage, that then begins to teem with its _motley
inhabitant_, and just representative of the _created world_, active,
wicked, gay, amusing, which gains your heart, but never your esteem:
tricking, shifting, and worthless as it is--but after all its _frisks_,
all its _escapes_, is condemned at last to burn in _fire, and pass
entirely away_. Such was, I trust, the idea of the person, whoever he
was, that had the honour first to compose this curious exhibition, and
model this mythological device into a pantomime! for the _mundane_, or
as Proclus calls it, the _orphick_ egg, is possibly the earliest of all
methods taken to explain the rise, progress, and final conclusion of our
earth and atmosphere; and was the original _theory_ brought from Egypt
into Greece by Orpheus. Nor has that prodigious genius, Dr. Thomas
Burnet, scorned to adopt it seriously in his _Telluris Theoria sacra_,
written less than a century ago, adapting it with wonderful ingenuity
to the Christian system and Mosaical account of things; to which it
certainly does accommodate itself the better, as the form of an egg well
resembles that of our habitable globe; and the internal div