In a poem written in "verse burlesque" by Sir William D'Avenant, entitled 'The Long Vacation in London,'-(we have already quoted from this curious picture of manners)—there is a very satisfactory enumeration of the principal sights which were presented to the admiring wayfarers of our city at the period when the Restoration had given back to the people some of their ancient amusements, and the councils of the primitive church were no longer raked up, as they were by old Prynne, to denounce bear-leaders and puppet-showmen as the agents of the evil one,-excommunicated persons who were to be dealt with by the strong arm of the law, civil and ecclesiastical. It may be convenient in our notice of this large miscellaneous subject if we take D'Avenant's description as a middle point in the history of street sights; looking occasionally, by way of comparison, at the more remarkable of those classes of popular exhibitors who may be called the ancestors, and those who are in the same manner the descendants, of the individual performers of the days of Charles II. The passage in D'Avenant's poem is as follows:

"Now vaulter good, and dancing lass

On rope, and man that cries Hey, pass!
And tumbler young that needs but stoop,
Lay head to heel to creep through hoop;

* See Prynne's Histrio-Mastix, P. 583.

And man in chimney hid to dress,
Puppet that acts our old Queen Bess,
And man that whilst the puppets play,
Through nose expoundeth what they say;
And white oat-eater that does dwell
In stable small at sign of Bell,
That lift up hoof to show the pranks
Taught by magician, styled Banks;
And ape, led captive still in chain
Till he renounce the Pope and Spain:
All these on hoof now trudge from town
To cheat poor turnip-eating clown."

What a congregation of wonders is here! Hogarth could not have painted his glorious Southwark Fair' without actual observation; but here is an assemblage from which a companion picture might be made, offering us the varieties of costume and character which distinguish the age of Charles II. from that of George II. But such sights can only be grouped together now in London upon remarkable occasions. The London of our own day, including its gigantic suburbs, is not the place to find even in separate localities the vaulter, the dancing lass, the conjurer, the tumbler, the puppet-show, the raree-show, the learned horse, or the loyal ape. Fleet Street, for example, is much too busy a place for the wonder-mongers to congregate in. A merchant in Ben Jonson's 'Fox' says

""Twere a rare motion to be seen in Fleet-street."

A motion is another name for a puppet-show. His companion answers,

"Ay, in the Term."

Fifty years afterwards D'Avenant tells us of his vagabonds, that in the Long Vacation

"All these on hoof now trudge from town

To cheat poor turnip-eating clown."

The sight-showers, we thus see, were in high activity in the Term, because Fleet Street was then full. When is it now empty? There is no room for their trades. They are elbowed out. We have seen, however, in some half-quiet thoroughfare of Lambeth, or of Clerkenwell, a dingy cloth spread upon the road, and a ring of children called together at the sound of horn, to behold a dancing lass in all the finery of calico trousers and spangles, and a tumbler with his hoop: and on one occasion sixpence was extracted from our pockets, because the said tumbler had his hoop splendid with ribbons, which showed him to have a reverence for the poetry and antiquity of his calling. He knew the line,— "And wear his colours like a tumbler's hoop*."

But the tumbler himself was a poor performer. His merit was not called out. The street passengers had as little to give to him as to the beggars, because they were too busy to be amused. If the Italian who exhibited before Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth could appear again in our metropolitan thoroughfares, we should pass on, regardless of his "turnings, tumblings, castings, hops, jumps, leaps, skips, springs, gambols, summersets, caperings, and flights; forward, backward, sideways, downward, and upward, with sundry windings, gyrings, and

Love's Labour's Lost.

415

circumflexions*." Joseph Clark, the great posture-master, who figured about the period of the Revolution, would have had a much better chance with us. We require powerful stimulants; and he, as it is recorded in the Philosophical Transactions,' had "such an absolute command of all his muscles and joints, that he could disjoint almost his whole body." Not a deformity which nature or accident had produced in the most miserable of cripples but Joseph Clark could imitate. Ask for a hunchback, and he straightway had one at command. Require the

"Fair round belly with good capon lin'd,"

and he could produce it without a pillow. He would make his hips invade the place of his back; and it was perfectly easy to him for one leg to advance with the heel foremost, and another with the toes. He imposed upon Molins, a celebrated surgeon, so completely, that he was dismissed as an incurable cripple. No tailor could measure him, for his hump would shift from one shoulder to the other; and anon he would be perfectly straight and well proportioned. One picture of him has been preserved to posterity, but there ought to have been a dozen.

D'Avenant has grouped his performers as they had been practically associated together for some centuries before his time. The joculator was not very inferior in dignity to the minstrel; but in time he became degraded into a juggler, and a hocus-pocus. The "man that cries Hey, pass!" was the great star of the exhibition, and the rope-dancer and tumbler and vaulter were his satellites. In a print to the "Orbis Pictus" of Comenius (1658) the juggler and his exhibition. are represented with these various attractions. Nor was music wanting to the charm of these street performances. The beautiful air known by the name of 'Balance a Straw' was an especial favourite with the rope-dancers, and certainly its graceful movement would indicate that these performances had somewhat more of refinement in them than is commonly supposed to belong to such amuse

*Laneham's Letter from Kenilworth, 1575.

ments for the people. The air is given in Mr. Chappell's collection; but we hope it may still be heard from the chimes of some country church, which have gone on for a century or two bestowing their melodies upon thankless ears: more probably, growing out of order, the chimes have been voted a nuisance by the vestry, and are consigned to oblivion, with many other touching remembrances of the past.

The following engraving of a conjurer's booth in 1721 exhibits the alliance of the juggler with the tumbler. The feats which the painted cloth exhibits to us

are nothing very remarkable; but Hogarth, in his Southwark Fair,' has performances of another character. We have there a vaulter on the slack-rope, and he is no less a person than Signor Violante, who was sometimes honoured with more select spectators than Hogarth has assigned to him. Malcolm, in his 'Londinium Redivivum,' tells us, in his notice of St. Martin's church, "Soon after the completion of the steeple, an adventurous Italian named Violante descended from the arches, head foremost, on a rope stretched thence across St. Martin's Lane to the Royal Mews: the princesses were present, and many eminent persons." Hogarth in his print has preserved to us a representation of this sort of rope-flying. A man is thus descending from the church-tower in the background. This adventurer, whose name was Cadman, perished at Shrewsbury in the performance of a similar feat. In the Gentleman's Magazine' for 1740 there is a magnificent copy of verses "On the death of the famous flyer on the rope at Shrewsbury," full of classical similes. We prefer to transcribe the tomb

6

stone lines upon the poor man, which lines Steevens, in his edition of Hogarth, calls contemptible:

"Let this small monument record the name

Of Cadman, and to future times proclaim
How, by an attempt to fly from this high spire
Across the Sabrine stream, he did acquire
His fatal end. Twas not for want of skill,
Or courage, to perform the task, he fell:
No, no-a faulty cord, being drawn too tight,
Hurried his soul on high to take her flight,
Which bid the body here beneath good night."

But there is nothing new under the sun. Neither Cadman nor Violante were the inventors of steeple-flying. As early as the times of Edward VI. there was a precisely similar exhibition. The following description is from a paper in the 'Archæologia,' vol. vii., quoted in Strutt's Sports and Pastimes :'-"There was a rope, as great as the cable of a ship, stretched in length from the battlements of Paul's steeple, with a great anchor at one end, fastened a little before the dean of Paul's house-gate; and when his Majesty approached near the same, there came a man, a stranger, being a native of Arragon, lying on the rope with his head forward, casting his arms and legs abroad, running on his breast on the rope from the battlements to the ground, as if it had been an arrow out of a bow, and stayed on the ground. Then he came to his Majesty and kissed his foot; and so, after certain words to his Highness, he departed from him again, and went upwards upon the rope till he came over the midst of the churchyard, where he, having a rope about him, played certain mysteries on the rope, as tumbling, and casting one leg from another. Then took he the rope, and tied it to the cable, and tied himself by the right leg a little space beneath the wrist of the foot, and hung by one leg a certain space, and after recovered himself again with the said rope, and unknit the knot, and came down again. Which stayed his Majesty, with all the train, a good space of time." According to Holinshed, a similar performance took place in the reign of Mary, which cost the life of the performer. These tragedics upon the rope will remind the reader of one within the immediate memory of the people of London..

There is something which sounds very much like a reproach to our national character in the fate of Scott, the American diver. We had heard of men who had repeatedly performed the perilous feat of leaping down the fall of some mighty river, rising safely out of the foam of the cataract; and here was a man of the same metal come amongst us, to show what human courage and skill may accomplish. It was a thrilling sight, and one not without its moral lessons, to see this American Scott leap from the top of

"The tallest pine

Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
Of some great ammiral.”

The breathless expectation till he rose again to the surface, and the shout which welcomed him as he threw back his dripping hair, approached the sublime. All his movements in the display of his peculiar talent as a diver were natural and graceful. His hardihood was of no common kind. He maintained, not in the spirit of bravado, but in sober earnestness, that he would leap off the Monument