its crackt, your crownes consumed, and time (the most
precious riches of the world) utterly lost."

With regard to the fool's business on the stage, it was nearly the same
as in reality, with this difference, that the wit was more highly
seasoned. In Middleton's "Mayor of Quinborough," a company of actors,
with a Clown, make their appearance, and the following dialogue
ensues:--

1st Cheater. This is our Clown, sir.

Simon. Fye, fye, your company
Must fall upon him and beat him; he's too fair i'faith,
To make the people laugh.

1st Cheater. Not as he may be dress'd, sir.

Simon. Faith, dress him how you will. I'll give him
That gift, he will never look half scurvily enough.
Oh! the Clowns that I have seen in my time,
The very peeping out of one of them would have
Made a young heir laugh, though his father lay a-dying;
A man undone in law the day before,
(The saddest case that can be) might for his second
Have burst himself with laughing, and ended all
His miseries. Here was a merry world, my masters!
Some talk of things of state, of puling stuff;
There's nothing in a play like to a Clown,
If he have the grace to hit on it, that's the thing indeed.
Away then, shift; Clown, to thy motley crupper.

In the _praeludium_ to Goffe's "Careless Shepherdess," 1656, quarto,
there is a panegyric on them, and some concern is shown for the fool's
absence in the play itself, while it is stated that "The motley coat was
banished with trunk-hose." Yet in Charles II.'s reign, some efforts were
made to restore the character. In the tragedy of "Thorney Abbey, or the
London Maid," 1662, 12mo., the prologue is delivered by a fool, who uses
these words:--"The poet's a fool who made the tragedy, to tell a story
of a king and a court, and leave a fool out on't, when in Pacey's, and
Sommer's, and Patche's, and Archer's times, my venerable predecessours,
a fool was alwaies the principal verb." Shadwell's play of "The Woman
Captain," 1680, is perhaps the last in which a regular fool is
introduced; and even there, his master is made to say that the character
was exploded on the stage. In real life, as was formerly stated, the
professed fool was to be met with at a much later period, but the custom
has long been obsolete.

What I have said of the My