We have an irruption of other popular characters into the fair, all in high keeping with the time and place:--a costard-monger; a gilt gingerbread woman; a mountebank; a corn-cutter; a wrestler; a cut-purse (a babe of booty, or child of the horn-thumb!); a gamester; a ballad-singer; an “ostler, trade-fallen a roarer (a swash-buckler, in later times a mohock); puppet-show keepers and watchmen; Bartholomew Cokes, a natural born fool and squire; Waspe, his shrewder serving-man; Overdo, a bacchanalian justice; a gang of gypsies, and their hedge-priest, patriarch of the cut-purses, or Patrico to the A bram men and their prickers and prancers; and lastly, Mr. Lanthorn Leatherhead, a supposed caricature of Inigo Jones, with whom Ben Jonson was associated in some of his magnificent court masques. All these characters exhibit their humours, and present a living picture of what Bartholomew Fair was in 1614. We have the exact dress of the flaunting City Madam--a huge velvet custard, or three-cornered bonnet; for these pretenders to sanctity not only adorned their outward woman with the garments of vanity, but were the principal dealers in feathers (another fashionable part of female dress in the days of Elizabeth and James I.) in the Blackfriars. All the merchandise of Babylon (i. e. the fair!) is spread out to our view; Jews-trumps, rattles, mousetraps, penny ballads, * purses, pin-cases, Tobie's dogs, “comfortable bread,” (spiced gingerbread,) hobbyhorses, drums, lions, bears, Bartholomew whistling birds, (wooden toys,) dolls, ** and Orpheus and his fiddle in gin-work! We have its cant phrases, mendacious tricks, and practical jokes; and are invited into “a sweet delicate booth,” with boughs, to eat roast pig with the fire o' juniper and rosemary branches; and “it were great obstinacy, high and horrible obstinacy, to decline or resist the good titillation of the famelic sense,” and not enter the gates of the unclean for once, with the liquorish Rabbi. * Gifford says, “In Jonson's time, scarcely any ballad was printed without a woodcut illustrative of its subject. If it was a ballad of 'pure love,' or of 'good life/ which afforded no scope for the graphic talents of the Grub Street Apelles, the portrait of 'good Queen Elizabeth,' magnificently adorned, with the globe and sceptre, formed no unwelcome substitute for her loving subjects.” ** The following was the costume of a Bartlemy Fair doll, or baby:-- “Her petticoat of sattin, Her gown of crimson tabby, Laced up before, and spangled o'er, Just like a Barthol'mew Baby” The Comedian's Tales; or, Jests, Songs, and Pleasant Adventures of several Famous Players. 1729.