The _Shows_ of all kinds had their fronts towards the area of Smithfield, and their backs close against the backs of the stalls. The centre of the area was thus entirely open, and from the carriage way through it all the shows might be seen at one view. Against the pens at the side there were not any shows. No carriages or horsemen were permitted to enter the fair on account of the crowded masses of people present.... It has to be noted that there was an unusually large assemblage of shows at the fair, including several menageries. 1826. The “Mirror of the Months” contained the following graphic anticipation of the fair to be held this year:— Another year arrives, and spite of Corporation “resolutions,” and references to “the Committee,” and “Reports” and “recommendations” to abolish the fair, it is held again. Now arrives that saturnalia of nondescript noise and nonconformity “Bartlemy Fair;” when that prince of peace-officers the Lord Mayor changes his sword of state into a six-penny trumpet, and becomes the lord of misrule and the patron of pick-pockets; and lady Holland’s name leads an unlettered mob instead of a lettered one; when Richardson maintains, during three whole days and a half, a managerial supremacy that must be not a little enviable even in the eyes of Mr. Elliston himself; and Mr. Gyngell holds, during the same period, a scarcely less distinguished station as the Apollo of maid servants; when the incomparable (not to say _eternal_) _young_ Master Saunder’s rides on horseback to the admiration of all beholders, in the person of his eldest son; and when all the giants in the land, and the dwarfs too, make a general muster, and each proves to be according to the most correct measurement at least a foot taller, or shorter, than any other in the fair, and in fact the only one worth seeing,—“all the rest being impostors!” In short, when every booth in the fair combined in itself the attractions of all the rest, and so perplexes with its irresistible merit the rapt imagination of the half-holiday school boys who have got but sixpence to spend upon the whole, that they eye the outsides of each in a state of pleasing despair, till their leave of absence is expired twice over, and then return home filled with visions of giants and gingerbread nuts, and dream all night long of what they have not seen. The fair was small, and one of its principal features was the bookstalls, which occupied the whole of the west side of Giltspur Street.