companies protected by some great personage, wearing his badge or crest, and styling themselves his “servants”—­just as to this day the Drury Lane troop, under warrant of Davenant’s patent, still boast the title of “Her Majesty’s Servants”—­who attended at country seats, and gave representations at the request or by the permission of the great people of the neighbourhood; and secondly, the mere unauthorised itinerants, with no claim to distinction beyond such as their own merits accorded to them, who played in barns, or in large inn-yards and rooms, and against whom was especially levelled the Act of Elizabeth declaring that all players, &c., “not licensed by any baron or person of high rank, or by two justices of the peace, should be deemed and treated as rogues and vagabonds.”

The suppression of the theatres by the Puritans reduced all the players to the condition of strollers of the lowest class.  Legally their occupation was gone altogether.  Stringent measures were taken to abolish stage-plays and interludes, and by an Act passed in 1647, all actors of plays for the time to come were declared rogues within the meaning of the Act of Elizabeth, and upon conviction were to be publicly whipped for the first offence, and for the second to be deemed incorrigible rogues, and dealt with accordingly; all stage galleries, seats, and boxes were to be pulled down by warrant of two justices of the peace; all money collected from the spectators was to be appropriated to the poor of the parish; and all spectators of plays, for every offence, fined five shillings.  Assuredly these were very hard times for players, playhouses, and playgoers.  Still the theatre was hard to kill.  In 1648, a provost-marshal was nominated to stimulate the vigilance and activity of the lord mayor, justices, and sheriffs, and among other duties, “to seize all ballad-singers and sellers of malignant pamphlets, and to send them to the several militias, and to suppress stage-plays.”  Yet, all this notwithstanding, some little show of life stirred now and then in the seeming corpse of the drama.  A few players met furtively, assembled a select audience, and gave a clandestine performance, more or less complete, in some obscure quarter.  Secret Royalists and but half-hearted Puritans abounded, and these did not scruple to abet a breach of the law, and to be entertained now and then in the old time-honoured way.

With the Restoration, however, Thespis enjoyed his own again, and sock and buskin became once more lawful articles of apparel.  Charles II. mounted the throne arm-in-arm, as it were, with a player-king and queen.  The London theatres reopened under royal patronage, and in the provinces the stroller was abroad.  He had his enemies, no doubt.  Prejudice is long-lived, of robust constitution.  Puritanism had struck deep root in the land, and though the triumphant Cavaliers might hew its branches, strip off its foliage, and hack at its trunk, they could by no means extirpate