Etymologically the clown is the rustic, the rough peasant, pugnacious, ignorant and silly, who enlivens the sombre dramas of Shakespeare by his foolish quibbles. In England this ludicrous personage was the indispensable accessory of every play; he is nearly related to the French Jocrisse, who also wears the garb of a well-to-do countryman, and is equally ridiculed by the city folk. The Shakesperian clown has not yet disappeared. He is to be found with all his traditional attributes in the three [p279] companies of Hengler’s Circus, which travel all over England, and at Christmas time give simultaneous performances in London, Liverpool, and Dublin. [Illustration] I remember entering the arena of this national circus one Sunday morning in London, and being considerably surprised to find the whole company in morning dress assembled in the ring. A black-coated individual, Bible in hand, was addressing the acrobats. He was a clergyman. I have been told since that Mr. Hengler exacts punctual attendance at the Sunday services from every member of his troupe. In this traditional house, the Shakesperian clown, the _jester_, as he is called in the profession, appears in white tights, [p280] ornamented with blue or red patches indiscriminately arranged, with a short drapery round the hips, and a fool’s cap on his head. Thus attired, he does not caper and joke, but declaims passages from Shakespeare and sings Irish songs which delight the public in the cheap places. You can easily imagine that such a figure could not be moved from its native surroundings. The dialect of Old Tom, the tirades of King Lear, would not please any audience, except in the United Kingdom. Some other work must be found for foreign engagements. The _jester_, therefore, looked round to see if he could not gather some useful hints from his stage companions, that might help to fill his travelling bag, and naturally he studied the coloured _minstrels_. It is impossible to write a serious history of the clown without making some allusion to these negro singers. The modern clown, acrobat, magician, and pantomimist was produced by the union of the _jester_ and the _minstrel_. Lovers of old books, who strolled round the Quai Voltaire last winter may have noticed in the window of a dealer in curious prints, a collection of bad chromolithographs from New York which attracted and amused the passers by. They depicted the misfortunes of “coloured men,” caricatured by their old masters; ridiculous falls into buckets of water; a horse kicking a negro in the jaw; a gun exploding, blows a negro into a thousand pieces like Captain Castagnette. The mouths with their gleaming teeth are always split by a foot placed across them, the legs are thrown above the woolly heads in grotesque dances, which seem performed in rhythm to the blows of a whip. These coarse pictures were not signed [p281] by the artist, they bore the names of the publishers only, Currier and Ives of New York. [Illustration]