yers met furtively, assembled a select audience,
and gave a clandestine performance, more or less complete, in some
obscure quarter. Secret Royalists and but half-hearted Puritans
abounded, and these did not scruple to abet a breach of the law, and
to be entertained now and then in the old time-honoured way.

With the Restoration, however, Thespis enjoyed his own again, and sock
and buskin became once more lawful articles of apparel. Charles II.
mounted the throne arm-in-arm, as it were, with a player-king and
queen. The London theatres reopened under royal patronage, and in the
provinces the stroller was abroad. He had his enemies, no doubt.
Prejudice is long-lived, of robust constitution. Puritanism had struck
deep root in the land, and though the triumphant Cavaliers might hew
its branches, strip off its foliage, and hack at its trunk, they could
by no means extirpate it altogether. Religious zealotry, strenuous and
stubborn, however narrow, had fostered, and parliamentary enactments
had warranted, hostility of the most uncompromising kind to the player
and his profession. To many he was still, his new liberty and
privileges notwithstanding, but "a son of Belial"--ever of near kin to
the rogue and the vagabond, with the stocks and the whipping-post
still in his immediate neighbourhood, let him turn which way he would.
And then, certainly, his occupation had its seamy side. With this the
satirists, who loved censure rather for its wounding than its healing
properties, made great play. They were never tired of pointing out and
ridiculing the rents in the stroller's coat; his shifts, trials,
misfortunes, follies, were subjects for ceaseless derision. What Grub
Street and "penny-a-lining" have been to the vocation of letters,
strolling and "barn-strutting" became to the histrionic profession--an
excuse for scorn, underrating, and mirth, more or less bitter.

Still strolling had its charms. To the beginner it afforded a kind of
informal apprenticeship, with the advantage that while a learner of
its mysteries, he could yet style himself a full member of the
profession of the stage, and share in its profits. He was at once bud
and flower. What though the floor of a ruined barn saw his first crude
efforts, might not the walls of a patent theatre resound by-and-by
with delighted applause, tribute to his genius? It was a free, frank,
open vocation he had adopted; it was unprotected and unrestricted by
legislative provisions i