There was a famous vaulter of this time, named William Stokes, who seems to have been the first to introduce horses in the performance; and in a book called the _Vaulting Master_, published at Oxford in 1652, boasts that he had reduced vaulting to a method. The book is illustrated by plates, representing different examples of his practice, in which he is shown vaulting over one or more horses, or leaping upon them; in one alighting in the saddle, and in another upon the bare back of a horse. It is singular that this last feat should not have been performed after Stokes’s time, until Alfred Bradbury exhibited it a few years ago at the Amphitheatre in Holborn. It is improbable that Bradbury had seen the book, and his performance of the feat is, in that case, one more instance of the performance of an original act by more than one person at considerable intervals of time. May Fair, which has given its name to a locality now aristocratic, introduces us, in 1702—the year in which the fearful riot occurred in which a constable was killed there—to Thomas Simpson, an equestrian vaulter, described in a bill of Husband’s booth as ‘the famous vaulting master of England.’ A few years later a bill of the entertainments of Bartholomew Fair, preserved in Bagford’s collection in the library of the British Museum, mentions tight-rope dancing and some performing dogs, which had had the honour of appearing before Queen Anne and ‘most of the quality.’ The vaulters, and posturers, and tight-rope performers of this period were not all the vagabonds they were in the eye of the law. Fawkes, a posturer and juggler of the first half of the eighteenth century, started, in conjunction with a partner named Pinchbeck, a show which was for many years one of the chief attractions of the London fairs, and appears to have realized a considerable fortune. The earliest notice of Vauxhall Gardens occurs in the _Spectator_ of May 20th, 1712, in a paper written by Addison, when they had probably just been opened. They were then a fashionable promenade, the entertainments for which the place was afterwards famous not being introduced until at least a century later. In 1732 they were leased to Jonathan Tyers, whose name is preserved in two neighbouring streets, Tyers Street and Jonathan Street; and ten years later they were purchased by the same individual, and became as famous as Ranelagh Gardens for musical entertainments and masked balls. Admission was by season tickets only, and it is worthy of note that the inimitable Hogarth, from whose designs of the four parts of the day Hayman decorated the concert-room, furnished the design for the tickets, which were of silver. Tyers gave Hogarth a gold ticket of perpetual admission for six persons, or one coach; and the artist’s widow bequeathed it to a relative. This unique relic of the departed glories of Vauxhall was last used in 1836, and is now in the possession of Mr Frederick Gye, who gave twenty pounds for it.