a large four-post bed!  The spaces on either side were concealed from the audience by curtains, and formed the tiring-rooms of the ladies and gentlemen of the troop.  On this very curious stage the comedian afterwards famous as Little Knight, but then new to his profession, appeared as Acres in “The Rivals,” and won great applause.  Goldsmith’s Strolling Player is made to reveal many of the smaller needs and shifts of his calling, especially in the matter of costume.  “We had figures enough, but the difficulty was to dress them.  The same coat that served Romeo, turned with the blue lining outwards, served for his friend Mercutio:  a large piece of crape sufficed at once for Juliet’s petticoat and pall; a pestle and mortar from a neighbouring apothecary answered all the purposes of a bell; and our landlord’s own family, wrapped in white sheets, served to fill up the procession.  In short, there were but three figures among us that might be said to be dressed with any propriety; I mean the nurse, the starved apothecary, and myself.”  Of his own share in the representation the stroller speaks candidly enough:  “I snuffed the candles, and, let me tell you, that without a candle-snuffer the piece would lose half its embellishments.”  But there has always been forthcoming a very abundant supply of stories of this kind, not always to be understood literally, however, concerning the drama under difficulties, and the comical side of the player’s indigence, distresses, and quaint artifices to conceal his poverty.

A word should be said as to the courage and enterprise of our early strollers.  Travelling is nowadays so easy a matter that we are apt to forget how solemnly it was viewed by our ancestors.  In the last century a man thought about making his will as a becoming preliminary to his journeying merely from London to Edinburgh.  But the strollers were true to themselves and their calling, though sometimes the results of their adventures were luckless enough.  “Our plantations in America have been voluntarily visited by some itinerants, Jamaica in particular,” writes Chetwood, in his “History of the Stage” (1749).  “I had an account from a gentleman who was possessed of a large estate in the island that a company in the year 1733 came there and cleared a large sum of money, where they might have made moderate fortunes if they had not been too busy with the growth of the country.  They received three hundred and seventy pistoles the first night of the ‘Beggar’s Opera,’ but within the space of two months they buried their third Polly and two of their men.  The gentlemen of the island for some time took their turns upon the stage to keep up the diversion; but this did not hold long; for in two months more there were but one old man, a boy, and a woman of the company left.  The rest died either with the country distemper or the common beverage of the place, the noble spirit of rum-punch, which is generally fatal to new-comers.  The shattered remains, with upwards of two thousand pistoles in bank, embarked for Carolina, to join another company at Charlestown, but were cast away in the voyage.  Had the company been more blessed with the virtue of sobriety, &c., they might perhaps have lived to carry home the liberality of those generous islanders.”