and a soldier, a dressed lady, and a lady in riding habit; the scene changes to the outside of a handsome house, when the louting men, running in, place their backs against the door.  The front of the house turns, and at the same instant the machine turns, a supper ready dressed rises up.  The countrymen’s wives remain with the Doctor, who (afterwards) goes out.  He beckons the table, and it follows him.  Punch, Scaramouch, and Pierrot are next met by the Doctor, who invites them into a banquet.  The table ascends into the air.  He waves his wand, and asses’ ears appear at the sides of their heads.  A usurer lending money to Dr. Faustus demands a limb as security, and cuts off the Doctor’s leg, several legs appear on the scene, and the Doctor strikes a woman’s leg with his wand, which immediately flies from the rest, and fixes to the Doctor’s stump, who dances with it ridiculously.  The next scene opens, disclosing the Doctor’s study.  He enters affrighted, and the clock strikes one; the figures of Time and Death appear.  Several devils enter and tear him in pieces, some sink, some fly out, each bearing a limb of him.  The last, which is the grand scene, is the most magnificent that ever appeared on the English stage—­all the gods and goddesses discovered with the apotheosis of Diana, ascending into the air.

The tricks that formed part and parcel of the Pantomimes, in causing surprise and wonderment, placed Harlequin, for his extraordinary feats, in the first rank of magicians.  Oftentimes, however, they were the cause of many accidents.

Chetwood—­William Rufus Chetwood—­who had, in the eighteenth century, a bookseller’s shop in Covent Garden, and was, for twenty years, prompter for Drury Lane, a writer of four plays, and a volume of sketches of the actors whom he had met, says:—­“A tumbler at the Haymarket beat the breath out of his body by an accident, and which raised such vociferous applause that lasted the poor man’s life, for he never breathed more.  Indeed, his wife had this comfort, when the truth was known, pity succeeded to the roar of applause.  Another accident occurred in the Pantomime of ‘Dr. Faustus’ (previously referred to), at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, where a machine in the working threw the mock Pierrot down headlong with such force that the poor man broke a plank on the stage with his fall, and expired; another was sorely maimed that he did not survive many days; and a third, one of the softer sex, broke her thigh.”

Vandermere, the Harlequin, one of the most agile that ever trod the stage, on one occasion, in the pursuit by the Clown, leaped through a window on to the stage, a full thirteen feet.  Performing at the Dublin theatre one night, having a prodigious leap to make, the persons behind the scenes not being ready to receive him in the customary blanket, he fell upon the stage and was badly bruised.  This accident occasioned him to take a solemn oath that he would never take another leap upon the stage; nor did he violate his oath, for when he afterwards played Harlequin another actor of his size, and of considerable activity was equipped with the parti-coloured habit, and when a leap was necessary Vandermere passed off on one side of the stage as Dawson—­Vandermere’s understudy—­entered at the other, and undertook it.