[Footnote A:  A survival of the days when noblemen often had their own companies of actors, and were empowered to regulate the performances of these dramatic servants.]

It is curious that the functionary to whom was assigned the important critical duty of revising plays should also be obliged to concern himself with the doings of puppets and country “side shows.”  Yet before the law there was very little if any difference between a performance of “Hamlet” by the great Betterton, and an exhibition of the marital infelicities of Punch and Judy.  Are matters so much better now that we can afford to laugh at the incongruity?  Do not theatres devoted to the “legitimate” and dime museums, the homes of triple-pated men, human corkscrews and other intellectual freaks, come under the same police supervision, and rank one and all within the same classification as “places of amusement?” Nay, to go further and fare worse, do not some of these very freaks regard themselves as fellow-workers in the dramatic vineyard made so fertile through the toil of a Booth, a Mansfield or a Terry?  The writer has himself heard the manipulator of a marionette troupe (whose wife, by-the-way, posed in a curio hall as a “Babylonian Princess”) speak of Sir Henry Irving as “a brother professional.”

This complacent individual had his prototype during the very period which we are considering.  He was an artistic gentleman named Crawley, the happy manager of a puppet show which used to bring joy into the hearts of the merry people thronging the famous Bartholomew Fair.  One fine day, as the manager was standing outside of his booth, he was put into a flutter of excitement by the approach of the mighty Betterton, in company with a country friend.  The actor offered several shillings for himself and rustic as they were about to enter the show, but this was too much for Crawley.  He saw the chance of his life, and took advantage of it.  “No, no, sir,” he said to “Old Thomas,” with quite the patronising air of an equal, “we never take money of one another!” Betterton did not see the matter in the same light, and, indignantly throwing down the silver, stalked into the booth without so much as thanking the proprietor of the puppets.

What a Bedlam of a place Bartholomew must have been, with its noise, its gew-gaws, bad beer, cheap shows, and riotous visitors.  Ned Ward, to whose descriptions modern readers are indebted, partly through the aid of John Ashton,[A] for many a glimpse of old-time London life, has left us a vivid picture of the fair as it appeared to him.  The entrance to it, he says, was like unto a “Belfegor’s concert,” with its “rumbling of drums, mixed with the intolerable squalling of catcalls and penny trumpets.”  Nor could the sense of smell have been much better catered to than that of hearing, owing to the “singeing of pigs and burnt crackling of over-roasted pork.”  Once within the enclosure he saw all sorts of remarkable things, including the actors, “strutting round