note A: A survival of the days when noblemen often had their own
companies of actors, and were empowered to regulate the performances
of these dramatic servants.]

It is curious that the functionary to whom was assigned the important
critical duty of revising plays should also be obliged to concern
himself with the doings of puppets and country "side shows." Yet
before the law there was very little if any difference between a
performance of "Hamlet" by the great Betterton, and an exhibition of
the marital infelicities of Punch and Judy. Are matters so much better
now that we can afford to laugh at the incongruity? Do not theatres
devoted to the "legitimate" and dime museums, the homes of
triple-pated men, human corkscrews and other intellectual freaks, come
under the same police supervision, and rank one and all within the
same classification as "places of amusement?" Nay, to go further and
fare worse, do not some of these very freaks regard themselves as
fellow-workers in the dramatic vineyard made so fertile through the
toil of a Booth, a Mansfield or a Terry? The writer has himself heard
the manipulator of a marionette troupe (whose wife, by-the-way, posed
in a curio hall as a "Babylonian Princess") speak of Sir Henry Irving
as "a brother professional."

This complacent individual had his prototype during the very period
which we are considering. He was an artistic gentleman named Crawley,
the happy manager of a puppet show which used to bring joy into the
hearts of the merry people thronging the famous Bartholomew Fair. One
fine day, as the manager was standing outside of his booth, he was put
into a flutter of excitement by the approach of the mighty Betterton,
in company with a country friend. The actor offered several shillings
for himself and rustic as they were about to enter the show, but this
was too much for Crawley. He saw the chance of his life, and took
advantage of it. "No, no, sir," he said to "Old Thomas," with quite
the patronising air of an equal, "we never take money of one another!"
Betterton did not see the matter in the same light, and, indignantly
throwing down the silver, stalked into the booth without so much as
thanking the proprietor of the puppets.

What a Bedlam of a place Bartholomew must have been, with its noise,
its gew-gaws, bad beer, cheap shows, and riotous visitors. Ned Ward,
to whose descriptions modern readers are indebted, partly through the
aid of John Ashton,[A] for many a