neatly out each actor’s share in the dialogues and speeches.  Night brought the performance, and, for the player engaged as “utility,” infinite change of dress and “making-up” of his face to personate a variety of characters.  The company would, probably, be outnumbered by the dramatis personae, in which case it would devolve upon the actor to assume many parts in one play.  Thus, supposing Hamlet to be announced for representation, the stroller of inferior degree might be called upon to appear as Francisco, afterwards as a lord-in-waiting in the court scenes, then as Lucianus, “nephew to the king,” then as one of the grave-diggers, then as a lord again, or, it might be, Osric, the fop, in the last act.  Other duties, hardly less arduous, would fall to him in the after-pieces.  “I remember,” said King, the actor famous as being the original Sir Peter Teazle and Lord Ogleby, “that when I had been but a short time on the stage, I performed one night King Richard, sang two comic songs, played in an interlude, danced a hornpipe, spoke a prologue, and was afterwards harlequin, in a sharing company; and after all this fatigue my share came to threepence and three pieces of candle!” A strolling manager of a later period was wont to boast that he had performed the complete melodrama of “Rob Roy” with a limited company of five men and three women.  Hard-worked, ill-paid, and, consequently, ill-fed, the stroller must have often led a dreary and miserable life enough.  The late Mr. Drinkwater Meadows used to tell of his experiences with a company that travelled through Warwickshire, and their treasury being empty, depended for their subsistence upon their piscatorial skill.  They lived for some time, indeed, upon the trout streams of the county.  They plied rod and line, and learned their parts at the same time.  “We could fish and study, study and fish,” said the actor.  “I made myself perfect in Bob Acres while fishing in the Avon, and committed the words to my memory quite as fast as I committed the fish to my basket.”

The straits and necessities of the strollers have long been a source of entertainment to the public.  In an early number of the “Spectator,” Steele describes a company of poor players then performing at Epping.  “They are far from offending in the impertinent splendour of the drama.  Alexander the Great was acted by a fellow in a paper cravat.  The next day the Earl of Essex seemed to have no distress but his poverty; and my Lord Foppington wanted any better means to show himself a fop than by wearing stockings of different colours.  In a word, though they have had a full barn for many days together, our itinerants are so wretchedly poor that the heroes appear only like sturdy beggars, and the heroines gipsies.”  It is added that the stage of these performers “is here in its original situation of a cart.”  In the “Memoirs of Munden” a still stranger stage is mentioned.  A strolling company performing in Wales had for theatre a bedroom, and for stage