Excerpt from The Commedia Dell'arte: A Study in Italian Popular Comedy A small Pennsylvania town turned itself out one breathless summer day not long ago to watch an entertainment given in a large airy barn by a family of wandering geniuses, not gypsies or minstrels, certainly not agents as the term is generally understood, but hard-headed Yankee originals with something Of their own to sell and apparently a novel way Of their own Of selling it. The something was a certain soap, guaranteed of the purest; the method of advertisement was to take it as the theme of a simple farce, a theme varied by all manner Of songs in its praises and allusions to its perfections, brought as by accident into the pauses Of a banal dialog. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.