and dresses, the latter being procured generally from certain shops in Monmouth Street dealing in cast clothes and tarnished frippery that did well enough for histrionic purposes; then, engaging a company, he would start from London as a manager, to visit certain districts where it was thought that a harvest might be reaped.  The receipts were divided among the troop upon a prearranged method.  The impresario took shares in his different characters of manager, proprietor, and actor.  Even the fragments of the candles that had lighted the representations were divided amongst the company.  Permission had always to be sought of the local magnates before a performance could be given; and the best-dressed and most cleanly-looking actor was deputed to make this application, as well as to conciliate the farmer or innkeeper, whose barn, stable, or great room was to be hired for the occasion.  Churchill writes: 

    The strolling tribe, a despicable race,
    Like wandering Arabs, shift from place to place. 
    Vagrants by law, to justice open laid,
    They tremble, of the beadle’s lash afraid;
    And fawning, cringe for wretched means of life
    To Madame Mayoress or his worship’s wife.

“I’m a justice of the peace and know how to deal with strollers,” says Sir Tunbelly, with an air of menace, in “The Relapse.”  The magistrates, indeed, were much inclined to deal severely with the wandering actor, eyeing his calling with suspicion, and prompt to enforce the laws against him.  Thus we find in “Humphrey Clinker,” the mayor of Gloucester eager to condemn as a vagrant, and to commit to prison with hard labour, young Mr. George Dennison, who, in the guise of Wilson, a strolling player, had presumed to make love to Miss Lydia Melford, the heroine of the story.

In truth, the stroller’s life, with all its seeming license and independence, must always have been attended with hardship and privation.  If the player had ever deemed his art the “idle calling” many declared it to be, he was soon undeceived on that head.  There was but a thin partition between him and absolute want; meanwhile his labour was incessant.  The stage is a conservative institution, adhering closely to old customs, manners, and traditions, and what strolling had once been it continued to be almost for centuries.  “A company of strolling comedians,” writes the author of “The Road to Ruin,” who had himself strolled in early life, “is a small kingdom, of which the manager is the monarch.  Their code of laws seems to have existed, with little variation, since the days of Shakespeare.”  Who can doubt that Hogarth’s famous picture told the truth, not only of the painter’s own time, but of the past and of the future?  The poor player followed a sordid and wearisome routine.  He was constrained to devote long hours to rehearsal and to the study of various parts, provided always he could obtain a sight of the book of the play, for the itinerant theatre afforded no copyist then to write