The transformation of this failing arena of British sport into the full-blooded pleasure-garden of Cremorne was effected by another Baron, though he was such only by the courtesy of Bow Street and Maiden Lane. Renton Nicholson (for that was his name), like most of the managers of Cremorne, was a man who knew a thing or two. He was born early in the century, and his boyhood was spent in the quiet village of Islington, where his two sisters kept a young ladies’ seminary. His tastes early led him to the distractions of Sadler’s Wells, and at sixteen, {4a} when he became a pawnbroker’s assistant in Shadwell, he began to acquire his remarkable knowledge of the ‘flash’ life of London in all its grades. About 1830 he opened a jeweller’s shop in the West End, which supplied the ‘swells’ of the day and their female friends, and by this time his London acquaintanceships were extensive and peculiar, consisting, as we are told, of shady journalists, players, tavern vocalists, and rooks of all shades from the welsher to the skittle sharp. He knew the taste of his public, and in 1837 began to issue the scurrilous journal called _The Town_, for which Dr. Maginn and other lively contributors used to write. After a minor experience of gambling-houses and doubtful premises of various kinds, he became (in 1841) proprietor of the Garrick’s Head in Bow Street, and here, in a room holding about 300 people, and fitted up like a law-court, he presided—as Lord Chief Baron Nicholson—over the judge and jury trials that were so attractive to the Londoner of the forties and fifties. The causes that came before this tribunal were chiefly matrimonial—the _crim. con._ cases of the time—and were such that their obscenity and heartlessness (mitigated, it is true, by flashes of wit) often made the most hardened sinner shudder. Nicholson presided over similar trials at those famous haunts, the Coal Hole and the Cyder Cellars, till his death in 1861. He was impudent in manner, obese and sensual in appearance, yet a man of real talent and geniality, gone hopelessly upon the wrong track. His apologists describe him as a sort of nineteenth-century Robin Hood, who plucked the aristocratic pigeon, but was ‘the soul of good nature’ to the poor Bohemian. {4b} His connexion with Cremorne was brief, and his capital inadequate. In 1843 he replaced the timid prospectus of De Berenger by flaming bills announcing a ‘Thousand Guineas Fête,’ which during three days (July 31, August 1 and 2), at one shilling admission, provided, among other diversions, a mock tournament, a pony-race, a performance by Tom Matthews the clown, and a _pas de deux_ by T. Ireland and Fanny Matthews.