The haze which envelopes the movements of travelling circuses prior to the time when they began to be recorded weekly in the _Era_ cannot always be penetrated, even after the most diligent research. Circus proprietors are, as a rule, disposed to reticence upon the subject; and the bills of tenting establishments are seldom preserved, and would afford no information if they were, being printed without the names of the towns and the dates of the performances. I have been unable, therefore, to trace Hengler’s and Sanger’s circuses to their beginnings; but, having seen the former pitched many years ago in the fair-field, Croydon, I know that it was tenting long before its proprietor adopted the system of locating his establishment for some months together in a permanent building. Both Hengler’s and Sanger’s must have been travelling nearly a quarter of a century, and the career of both has been prosperous. Indeed, the most successful men in the profession have been those who have lived from their infancy in the odour of the stables and the sawdust. Such a man was Ducrow, and such also are the Cookes, the Powells, the Newsomes, the Henglers, the Sangers, and, I believe, almost every man of note in the profession. They are not, as a rule, possessed of much education, which may account for the incongruities so frequently exhibited in the ‘getting up’ of equestrian spectacles, and the perplexities which so often meet the eye when the proprietor of a tenting circus parades in type the quadrupedal resources of his establishment. I remember seeing a zebra in the Cossack camp in _Mazeppa_, and that, too, at Astley’s; for neither Ducrow nor Batty cared much for correctness of local colouring, if they could produce an effect by disregarding it. Lewis, when reminded of the incongruity of the introduction of a negro in a Northumbrian castle, in the supposed era of the _Castle Spectre_, replied that he did it for effect; and if an effect could have been produced by making his heroine blue, blue she should have been. The effect, however, is sometimes perplexity, rather than excitement, so far at least as the educated portion of the community is concerned.