CHAPTER VI.

|The world is a stage; men and women are the players; chance composes the piece; Fortune (blind jade!) distributes the parts; the fools shift the scenery; the philosophers are the spectators; the rich occupy the boxes; the powerful, the pit; and the poor, the gallery. The forsaken of Lady Fortune snuff the candles,--Folly makes the concert,--and Time drops the curtain!

In a half sportive, half melancholy mood, we record this description of the tragi-comedy of human life. To weep, like Heraclitus, might exalt us to philanthropists; to make the distresses of mankind a theme of derision would brand us as buffoons. Though inclining to the example of Democritus,--for life is too short seriously to grapple with the thousand absurdities that daily demand refutation,--we take the middle course.

Far be from us the reproach of having no regard for our fellow-men, or pity for their errors!

Every one views a subject according to his particular taste and disposition. * Some happy fancies can find

“Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”

* To view Niagara's Falls one day A Priest and Tailor took their way; The Parson cried, while wrapt in wonder, And listening to the cataract's thunder, “Lord! how thy works amaze our eyes, And fill our hearts with vast surprise!” The Tailor merely made this note:-- “Lord! what a place to sponge a coat!”

Such would draw a truth from a tumbler, and a moral from a mountebank!

“Look through my glass,” says the philosopher, “Through mine” says the metaphysician. “Will your honour please to take a peep through my glass?” inquires the penny showman. The penny showman's glass for our money!

We are not to be hoodwinked by high-sounding authorities, who, like Tom Thumb, manufacture the giants they take the credit of killing! Bernier tells us, that whenever the Great Mogul made a remark, no matter how commonplace, the Omrahs lifted up their hands and cried “Wonder! wonder! wonder!” And their proverb saith, If the King exclaims at noon-day, “It is night” you are to rejoin, “Behold the moon and stars!”

Curious reader, picture to yourself a town-bred bachelor, with flowing wig, brocaded waistcoat, rolled silk stockings, and clouded cane, marching forth to take a survey of Bartholomew Fair, in the year 1701. Fancy the prim gentleman describing what he saw to some inquiring country kinsman in the following laconic epistle, and you will have a lively contemporary sketch of Smithfield Rounds.

Cousin Corydon,

Having no business of my own, * nor any desire to meddle with other people's, no wife to chin-music me, no brats to torment me, I dispelled the megrims by a visit to St. Bartholomew.

* “A Walk to Smith-field; or, a True Description of the Humours of Bartholomew Fair. 1701.”

The fair resembled a camp; only, instead of standing rank and file, the spectators were shuffled together like little boxes in a sharper's Luck-in-a-Bag. With much ado I reached Pye-Corner, where our English Sampson exhibited. Having paid for a seat three stories high in this wooden tent of iniquity, I beheld the renowned Man of Kent, * equipped like an Artillery Ground champion at the mock storming of a castle, lift a number of weights, which hung round him like bandaliers about a Dutch soldier.

“He fired a cannon, and with his own strength

Lifted it up, although 'twas of great length;

He broke a rope which did restrain two horses,

They could not break it with their two joint forces!'

* “The English Sampson, William Joy, aged twenty-four years, was horn in the Isle of Thanet, in Kent. He is a man of prodigious strength, of which he hath given proofs before his Majesty King William the Third, at Kensington, their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Denmark, and most of the nobility, at the Theatre Royal in Dorset Garden. AD. 1699.”

“James Miles, from Sadler's Wells in Islington, now keeps the Gun Musick Booth in Smithfield Rounds where the Famous Indian Woman lifts six hundred weight with the hair of her head, and walks about the booth with it.”

Topham, the Strong Man, lifted three hogsheads of water, weighing 183 lbs. the 28th of May 1741, in honour of Admiral Vernon, before thousands of people, in Bath Street, Cold- Bath-Fields. In his early years he exhibited at Bartholomew Fair. He united the strength of twelve men. The ostler of the Virgin's Inn having offended him, he took one of the spits from the kitchen and bent it round his neck like a handkerchief; but as he did not choose to tuck the ends in the ostler's bosom, the iron cravat excited the laughter of the company, till he condescended to untie it. He died by his own hand, on the 10th August 1749, the victim of his wife's infidelity.

“The Wonderful Strong and Surprising Persian Dwarf, three feet six inches high. He is fifty-six years old, speaks eighteen languages, sings Italian songs, dances to admiration, and with ropes tied to his hair, when put over his shoulders, lifts the great stone A.” This “great stone” is half as big as the little Sampson himself!

I then jostled to a booth, in which was only a puppet-show, * where, for twopence, I saw Jepthas rash Vow; or, The Virgins Sacrifice. In I went, almost headlong, to Pinkethmans Medley, ** to see the Vaulting of the horse, and the famous wooden puppets dance a minuet and a ballet.

* Only a Puppet-show!--Marry-come-up! Goodman Chronicler, doth not the mechanist, a very Prometheus, give life, spirit, and motion to what was a mopstick or the leg of ajoint-stool?

** “At Pinkethman, Mills, and Bullock's booth, over-against the Hospital Gate, will be presented The Siege of Barcelona, or the Soldier's Fortune; containing the comical exploits of Captain Blunderbuss and his man Squib; his adventures with the Conjuror, and a surprising scene where he and Squib are enchanted. Also the Diverting Humours of Corporal Scare- Devil. To which will be added, The wonderful Performance of Mr. Simpson, the vaulter, lately arrived from Italy. The musick, songs, and dances are by the best performers, whom Mr. Pinkethman has entertained at extraordinary charge, purely to please the town.”

At the Dutch Womans booth, * the Wheelbarrow dance, by a little Flemish girl ten years old, was in truth a miracle! A bill having been thrust into my hand, of a man and woman lighting for the breeches. **

* “You will see the famous Dutchwoman's side-capers, upright-capers, cross-capers, and back-capers on the tight rope. She walks, too, on the slack rope, which no woman but herself can do.”--“Oh, what a charming sight it was to see Madam What-d'ye-call-her swim it along the stage between her two gipsy daughters! You might have sworn they were of right Dutch extraction.”--A Comparison between the Two Stages, 1702.

Dancing on the rope was forbidden by an order of Parliament, July 17, 1647. The most celebrated rope-dancer on record is Jacob Hall, who lived in the reign of King Charles the Second. His feats of agility and strength, and the comeliness of his person, gained him universal patronage, and charmed, in particular, that imperious wanton, the Duchess of Cleveland. Henry the Eighth, in one of his “Progresses” through the city of London, “did spye a man upon the uppermost parte of St. Powle's Church: the man did gambol and balance himself upon his head, much to the fright and dismay of the multitude that he might breake his necke. On coming down, he did throw himselfe before the King beseechingly, as if for some reward for the exployt; whereupon the King's highness, much to his surprise, ordered him to prison as a roge and sturdy vagabonde.”--Black- Letter Chronicle, Printed in 1565.

** Our facetious friends, Messrs. Powell and Luffingham, at “Root's Booth”

I had the curiosity to look at this family picture, which turned out to be the Devil and Doctor Faustus, * the wife representing the Devil, and the husband the Doctor!

The tent of the English rope-dancers ** the rabble took by storm;--

* In a Bartlemy Fair bill, temp. James II. after the representation of “St. George for England,” wherein is shown how the valiant “saint slew the venomous Dragon,” the public were treated with “the Life and Death of Doctor Foster, (Faustus?) with such curiosity, that his very intrails turns into snakes and sarpints!”

** On the top of the following bill is a woodcut of the “Ladder Dance,” and the “two Famous High German children” vaulting on the tight rope. “At Mr. Barnes's Booth, between the Croton Tavern and the Hospital Gate, with the English Flag flying on the top, you will see Mr. Barnes dancing with a child standing upon his shoulders; also tumbling through hoops, over halberds, over sixteen men's heads, and over a horse with a man on his back, and two boys standing upright upon each arm! With the merry conceits of Pickle Herring and his son Punch.”

--but myself and a few heroes stood the brunt of the fray, and saw the Ladder Dance, and excellent vaulting on the slack and tight rope, by Mr. Barnes and the Lady Mary; I had a month's mind to a musick booth; but the reformation of manners having suppressed them all but one, I declined going thither, for fear of being thought an immoral person, and paid my penny to take a peep at the Creation of the World. Then

“To the Cloisters ** I went, where the gallants resort,

And all sorts and sizes come in for their sport,

Whose saucy behaviour and impudent air

Proclaim'd them the subjects of Bartlemy Fair!

There strutted the sharper and braggart, (a brace!)

And there peep'd a goddess with mask on her face! ----

I view'd all the shops where the gamblers did raffle,

And saw the young ladies their gentlemen baffle;

For though the fine sparks might sometimes have good

fate,

The shop had the money, the lass had the plate.”

* The Lady Mary, the daughter of a noble Italian family, was born in Florence, and immured in a nunnery, but eloped with a Merry Andrew, who taught her his professional tricks. She danced with great dexterity on the rope, from which (when urged by the avarice of her inhuman partner to exhibit during a period of bodily weakness) she fell, and died instantaneously.

** “The Cloister in Bartholomew Fair, a poem, London.

Thus ends the ramble, Cousin Corydon! of (Thine, as thy spouse's own,) Ingleberry Griskin.

Thanks! worthy chronicler of ancient St. Bartlemy.

Will Pinkethman was a first-rate comedian. The biographer of his contemporary, Spiller, says, “the managers of the Haymarket and Drury Lane always received too much profit from Pinkey's phiz, to encourage anybody to put that out of countenance!” And Pope refers to one popular qualification that he possessed, viz. eating on the stage (as did Dicky Suett, in after days, Dicky Gossip, to wit!) with great comic effect.

“And idle Cibber, how he breaks the laws,

To make poor Pinkey eat with vast applause!”

He was celebrated for speaking prologues and epilogues. * He realised a good fortune by his Puppet-show, and kept a booth at Bartholomew Fair. Two volumes of “Jests” * bear his name. Many of them are as broad as they are long. His love-letter to Tabitha, the fair Quakeress, signed “Yea and Nay, from thy brother in the light,” is wickedly jocose.

Thus Bartholomew Fair, in 1701, boasted its full complement of mimes, mountebanks, vaulters, costermongers, *** gingerbread women, (“ladies of the basket!”) puppet-shows, **** physiognoscopography,--

* Particularly “The New Comical Epilogue of Some-Body and No-Body, spoken by way of Dialogue between Mr. Pink-ethman and Jubilee Dicky” (Norris, so christened from his playing Beau Clincher in Farquhar's Trip to the Jubilee.)

** “Pinkethman's Jests, or Wit Refin'd, being a new year's gift for young gentlemen and ladies, 1721, First and Second Parts.'7 A fine mezzotinto portrait of Pinkethman, represents him in a laced coat and a flowing wig, holding in his hand a scroll, on which is inscribed, “Ridentibus arrident Vultus

*** Archdeacon Nares defines a costard-monger, or coster- mon-ger, to be “a seller of apples, one who generally kept a stall,”

**** “Here are the rarities of the whole Fair, Pimperle-Pimp, and the wise Dancing Mare; Here's Vienna besieg'd, a rare thing, And here's Punchinello, shewn thrice to the King. Ladies mask'd to the Cloisters repair, But there will be no raffling, a pise on the May'r!” From Playford's Musical Companion, 1701.

--Punches, and Roast Pig. * But its Drama was in abeyance. ** The elite of Pye-Corner, Gilt-spur Street, and the Cloth-quarter, preferred Pinkethman's Medley and Mr. Barnes's Rope-dancers, to “The Old Creation of the World New Revived,” with the intrigues of Lucifer in the Garden of Eden,--

* “A Catch--Mr. Henry Purcell--

Here's that will challenge all the Fair:

Come buy my nuts and damsons, my Burgamy Pear. Here's the Whore of Babylon, the Devil and the Pope: The girl is just going on the rope.

Here's Dives and Lazarus, and the World's Creation: Here's the Dutch Woman, the like's not in the nation. Here is the booth where the tall Dutch Maid is,

Here are the bears that dance like any ladies. Tota, tota, tot goes the little penny trumpet, 'Here's your Jacob Hall, that can jump it, jump it. Sound trumpet: a silver spoon and fork; Come, here's your dainty Pig and Pork”

** “The old Droll Players' Lamentation, being very pleasant and diverting. 1701.”

“Oh! mourn with us all you that live by play, The Reformation took our gains away: We are as good as dead now money's gone, No Droll is suffer'd, not a single one! Jack Pudding now our grandeur doth exceed, And grinning granny is by fates decreed To laugh at us, and to our place succeed. But after all, these times would make us rave, That won't let's play the Fool as well as Knave!”

--and Adam and Eve driven out of Paradise,”--“Judith and Holofernes,” * --“Dives and Pauper,”--the “Humours of Noah's Ark, or the Drolleries of the Deluge,”--“Jeptha's Rash Vow,”--and “The Pleasant Conceited History of Abraham and Isaac!” These Mysteries ** were only endured when tacked to “a Comick Dance of gigantic automatons the “merriments of Sir John Spendall and Punchinello; Pickle-Herring and Punch.” Of the multifarious and ludicrous literature of the “Rounds” little remains. The serious portion consisted, as we have shown, of such representations taken from Bible History, after the manner of the Chester and Coventry Monks, and the ancient Parish Clerks of Clerkenwell, as were most likely to beget an awful attention in the audience; and the comic, of detached scenes of low humour from Shakspere, and Beaumont and Fletcher, like “The Wits ***

* “To be sold in the Booth of Lee and Harper, and only printed for, and by G. Lee, in Blue Maid Alley, Southwark.”

** Spence, in his anecdotes, describes a Mystery he saw at Turin, “where a damned female soul, in a gown of flame- coloured satin, intreats, as a favor, to be handed over to the fires of purgatory, for only as many years as there are drops of water in the ocean!”

*** “The Wits, or Sport upon Sport: being a curious collection of several Drolls and Farces, as they have been sundry times acted at Bartholomew and other Fairs, in halls and taverns, on mountebanks' stages at Charing Cross, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and other places, by Strolling Flayers, Fools, Fiddlers, and Zanies, with loud laughter and applause. Now newly collected by your old friend, Francis Kirkman, 1673.” The author says, in his preface to the Second Part, “I have seen the Red Bull Playhouse, which was a large one, so full, that as many went back for want of room as had entered; and as meanly as you may think of these Drolls, they were acted by the best comedians then, and now in being. I once saw a piece at a country inn, called 'King Pharaoh, with Moses, Aaron, and some others; to explain which figures was added this piece of poetry,

Here Pharaoh, with his goggle eyes, does stare on The High Priest Moses, with the Prophet Aaron. Why, what a rascal Was he that would not let the people go to eat the Pascal!

I believe he who pictured King Pharaoh had never seen a king in his life; for all the majesty he was represented with was goggle eyes, that his picture might be answerable to the verse.”

--or Sport upon Sport” and “The Stroller's Pacquet Open'd--except when a Smithfield bard, “bemus'd in beer,” ventured upon originality, and added “Robin Hood, * an Opera,” and “The Quaker's Opera,” ** to the classical press of Bartholomew Fair.

* “Robin Hood, an opera, as it is performed at Lee and Harper's Great Theatrical Booth in Bartholomew Fair, 1730.”

** “The Quaker's Opera, as it is performed at Lee and Harper's Great Theatrical Booth in Bartholomew Fair, 1728.”

This is the story of Jack Sheppard dramatised and set to rough music! It may be gratifying to the curious to see how the adventures of this house and prison-breaker were “improved” (!!) by a Methodist Preacher under the Piazza of Covent Garden. “Now, my beloved, we have a remarkable instance of man's care for his tabernacle of clay in the notorious malefactor Jack Sheppard! How dexterously did he, with a nail, pick the padlock of his chain! how manfully burst his fetters; climb up the chimney; wrench out an iron bar; break his way through a stone wall, till he reached the leads of the prison! and then fixing a blanket through the wall with a spike, he stole out of the chapel! How intrepidly did he descend from the top of the Turner's house! and how cautiously pass down the stairs, and make his escape at the street-door! Oh, that ye were all like Jack Sheppard! Let me exhort ye, then, to open the locks of your hearts with the nail of repentance; to burst asunder the fetters of your beloved desires; to mount the chimney of hope; take from thence the bar of good resolution; break through the stone wall of despair; raise yourselves to the leads of divine meditation; fix the blanket of faith with the spike of the conventicle; let yourselves down the Turner's house of resignation, and descend the stairs of humility; so shall you come to the door of deliverance, from the prison of iniquity, and escape the clutches of that old executioner, the devil.”

Good company has occasionally visited the “Rounds.” Evelyn * went there, but it was to gape and grumble.

* 1648. 28 Aug: Saw ye celebrated follies of Bartholomew Fair, which follies were more harmless, in those days, than the solemn and sinister mummery of a Brownist's conventicle, a Presbyterian Synod, and a Quakers' meeting.

In the year 1670 (see “Some Account of Rachel Lady Russell,”) Lady Russell, with her sister, Lady Northumberland, and Lady Shafts-bury, returned from Bartholomew Fair loaded with fairings for herself and children! Sept. 1, 1730, the “Four Indian Kings” visited Pink-ethman and Giffard's booth, and saw Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. Sir Robert Walpole, * when Prime Minister, starred and gartered, graced the fair with his presence. Frederick Prince of Wales, in 1740, attended by a party of the Yeomen of the Guard with lighted flambeaux, contemplated its pantomimical wonders, with Manager Rich for his cicerone; as, in after times, did David Garrick and his lady, marshalled by the bill-sticker of Old Drury! On tendering his tester at the Droll Booth, the cashier, recognising the fine expressive features and far-beaming eye of Roscius, with a patronising look and bow, refused the proffered fee, politely remarking, “Sir, we never take money from one another.”

* A coloured print of Bartholomew Fair in 1721, copied from a painting on an old fan mount, represents Sir” Robert Walpole as one of the spectators.

Pinkethman's “Pantheon, or Temple of the Heathen Gods, consisting of five curious pictures, and above one hundred figures that move their heads, legs, and fingers, in character,” long continued the lion of Bartholomew and Southwark fairs. * On the 19th August, 1720, great preparations were made against the approaching festival. Stables were transmogrified into palaces for copper kings, lords, knights, and ladies! and cock-lofts and laystalls into enchanted castles and Elysium bowers! The ostlers beguiled the interval by exercising their pampered steeds, and levying contribution on such as happened to be enjoying the pure air of Hounslow Heath and Finchley Common! Mob quality in hackney coaches, and South-Sea squires in their own, resorted to Pinkethman's booth to divert themselves with his “comical phiz, and newly-imported French dancing dogs!” The mountebanks were all alive and merry, and a golden harvest was reaped in the Rounds.

* Sept. 13, 1717. Several constables visited Pinkethman's booth in Southwark Fair, and apprehended Pinkethman, with others of his company, just as they had concluded a play, in the presence of near 150 noblemen and gentlemen seated on the stage. They were soon liberated, on making it appear that they were the King's Servants. The Prince visited the booth.

Other exhibitions has the saint had beside his own. Exhibitions, as a nuisance, * from that _corpus sine pectore_, the London common council! “_Do thou amend thy face!_” was the reply of Falstaff to Bardolph, when the owner of the “fiery trigon” inflicted a homily on that “sweet creature of bombast.'” How much more needful, sons of repletion! is reform to you, than the showman, who seldom sees any punch but his own; the Jack-Pudding, who grins wofully for a slice of his namesake; and the “strong man,” who gets little else between his teeth but his table! Why not be merry your own way, and let mountebanks be merry theirs? Are license and excess to be entirely on the side of “robes and furrd gowns?”

* In “A Pacquet from Wills, 1701,” an actress of “the Playhouse,” writing to “a Stroller in the Country,” says, “My dear Harlequin, I hoped, according to custom, at the grand revels of St. Bartholomew to have solaced ourselves with roast pig and a bottle. But the master of that great bee-hive, the city, to please the canting, zealous horn- heads, has buzzed about an order there shall be no fair! The chief cause, say the reformers, is the profane drolls ( Whittington to wit) that ridicule the city's majesty, by hiring a paunch-bellied porter at half-a-crown a day, to represent an Alderman in a scarlet gown! when a lean-ribbed scoundrel in a blue jacket, for mimicking a fool, shall have forty shillings!” In 1743, 1750, 1760, 1798, 1825, and 1840, further attempts were made to put down the fair. In 1760 one Birch, (for whom St. Bartholomew had a rod in pickle! ) bearing the grandiloquent title of Deputy City Marshal (!! ) lost his life in a fray that broke out between the suppressing authorities and the fair folk.

The amendment of Bardolph's face (nose!) per se, was not a crying case of necessity; a burning shame to be extinguished with a zeal hot as the “fire o' juniper.” It only became so in conjunction with the reformation of Falstaff's morals! *

* If every man attended to his own affairs, he would find little time to pry into those of others. An idle head is the devil's garret. Your intermeddler is one who has either nothing to do, or having it to do, leaves it undone. It is good to reform others; 'tis better to begin with ourselves. He who censures most severely the faults of his neighbour is generally very merciful to his own. “One day judgeth another,” says old Stow, “and the last judgeth all.”

We laugh at the hypocrite when caught in his own snare--when guilty of the suppressio veri, he is openly detected in the suggestio falsi, and made to pay the penalty of his duplicity. An ancient beau, bounding with all the vigour and alacrity that age, gout, and rheumatism usually inspire, cuts not a more ridiculous figure!

Hermes, or Mercury, was a thief, and the god of thieves; Venus, a gay lady; Bacchus, a wine-bibber; and Juno, a scold. And what apology offers sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, for his infirmities! He lets judgment go by default! “Dost thou hear, Hal? thou knowest, in the state of innocency, Adam fell; and what should poor Jack Falstaff do, in these days of villany?”

This is truth as deep as the centre. Whoever shall cast a pebble at old Jack after this, must have his conscience Macadamised!

Be your grace * short, and your meals long. Abate not one slice of venison, one spoonful of turtle. Be the fat, white and green, all your own! ** But war not with _Punch_--

“Let the poor devil _eat_; allow him _that!_”

“Curtail not our holiday Septembrisers of their fair proportion of fun.”

“To those sentiments,” exclaimed Deputy Doublechin, “I most heartily respond!”

* The Rev. R. C. Dillon (Lord Mayor's chaplain in 1826) published in 1830 a “Sermon on the evil of fairs in general, and Bartholomew Fair in particular.” Who would have thought that this pious functionary had been so great a foe to the fair?

The following odd combinations occur in the title of a sermon published in 1734. “The deformity of sin cured; a sermon preached at St. Michael's Crooked Lane, before the Prince of Orange, (the Prince was not quite straight! ) by the Rev. J. Crookshanks. Sold by Matthew Denton at the Crooked Billet, near Cripplegate.

** A physician once observed that he could tell of what country a man was by his complaint. If it laid in the head, he was a Scotchman; if in the heart, he was an Irishman; if in the stomach, he was an Englishman.

And as the worshipful deputy's responses, six days out of the seven, were _wet_ ones, the punch and a glee went merrily round.

Punchinello's a jolly good fellow!

Making us merry, and making us mellow.

In the bowl, in the fair too, a cure for dull care too;

All ills that we find flesh or skin and bone heir to!

Verily he is the spirit of glee,

So in him drink to him with three times three!

Hip! hip! once, twice, thrice, and away!

Punchinello, _mon ami! a votre santé_.