On the lease of the Amphitheatre expiring in 1830, the owner of the premises raised the rent so much that Davis relinquished the undertaking. Ducrow, who possessed much of the energy and enterprise by which Philip Astley had been distinguished, saw his opportunity at once, and, obtaining a partner in William West, took the lease on the terms which his less enterprising predecessor had shrunk from. He produced a gorgeous Eastern spectacle, and engaged Stickney and young Bridges for the circle. Stickney was an admirable equestrian, the first of the many famous riders who have learned their art on the other side of the Atlantic, where he had already achieved a considerable reputation. Bridges was a rope-dancer, and gained great applause by turning a somersault on the rope, a feat which he appears to have been the first to perform. Later in the season, Henry Adams (the father of Charles Adams) made his appearance as a performer of rapid acts of equitation, the travelling circus which he had lately owned having passed into the possession of his late groom, John Milton. During the portion of this year when Astley’s was closed, Ducrow and his company, bipeds and quadrupeds, performed for a short time at Hull. Returning to the metropolis, he opened the Amphitheatre for the season of 1831 with the spectacular drama of _Mazeppa_, the only enduring performance of the kind with which Astley’s was for so many years associated. Most of them, elaborately as they were got up,—for Ducrow never spared expense,—and attractive as they proved at the time of their production, owed their popularity to recent military events; but the fortunes of the daring youth immortalized by the genius of Byron, and the headlong flight of the wild horse of the Ukraine, have proved an unfailing source of attraction, and made _Mazeppa_ the trump-card of every hippo-dramatic manager who possesses or can borrow a white horse qualified to enact the part of the ‘fiery, untamed steed’ upon whose bare back the hero is borne into the steppes of the Don Cossack country.