At the end of 1838 Bradley began to adorn his gardens somewhat in the manner of the Eagle, surrounding them with boxes, alcoves, and panoramic views, and building the new saloon for concerts and plays which became well known as the Albert Saloon. He opened the gardens on Easter Monday, 1839, announcing that they would accommodate 10,000 persons, of whom 4,000 were sure of shelter from the rain. Concerts, vaudevilles, and melodramas were for several years the staple of attraction, and the admission was usually not more than sixpence. Tom Jones, a mimic and comic singer, was the manager, and something was done in the way of fireworks, ballooning, and weekly dances. At the gardens of this period the mild attraction of a balloon ascent was often heightened by suspending from the car some living object—a pony, a donkey, or a man. The balloonist Gypson, who ascended from the Standard gardens in 1839, varied this device by attaching to his night-balloon ‘a model of the late Royal Exchange.’ Unfortunately, as the balloon was rising, the ‘late Royal Exchange’ caught fire and was burnt to ashes in the grounds, though the aeronaut cut the rope and soared on high in safety. As a minor theatre, the Albert Saloon never attained the well-deserved fame of its Grecian rival. But it is fair to say that in one week of 1846 it presented the tragedy of _Venice Preserved_, the tragedy of _Othello_, and _Cato_—not, indeed, Addison’s, but ‘_Cato_; _or_, _The Slave’s Revenge_, a romantic drama.’ To relieve the tension of this trying time, the drama of the _Jail Bird_ was enacted, and Jack Sheppard and Rookwood were at one time or another found to be the taste of the Albert audiences. The Albert Saloon had also its pantomimes, and for several years the noted clown, Paul Herring, was in its company. Herring had begun life, like other famous artists, by performing daily—and innumerable times daily—in Richardson’s show at Bartholomew Fair. He came to the Albert Saloon in 1839, and was afterwards clown at the Victoria and other theatres. In his later days he subsided into the lean and slippered pantaloon, a part that he played in the Drury Lane pantomime of 1877, the year before his death. The glory of the Albert appears to have waned at the end of the forties, and the place was closed about 1857, and the Royal Standard, a public-house numbered 106, Shepherdess Walk is now its only representative. {69} [The newspapers, and bills and posters of the Albert Saloon (W.); Colburn’s _Kalendar_, 1840, pp. 14, 163.] NEW GLOBE PLEASURE-GROUNDS, MILE END ROAD