On his death-bed a joke still lingered on his lips. A ghostly friar would have persuaded him to leave his estate (some five hundred pounds--a large sum in those days!) to the order of Mendicants; but Summers turned the tables upon him, quoted the covetous father's own doctrine, and left it to the “Prince of this world,” by whose favour he had gotten it. Tarlton * is entitled to especial notice, as being the original representative of the court-fool, or clown, upon the stage. Sir Richard Baker says, “Tarlton, for the part called the clowne's part, never had his match, and never will have.” * Bastard, in his Chrestoleros, 1598, has an epigram to “Richard Tarlton, the Comedian and Jester” and, in Nash's Almond for a Parrot, he is lauded for having made folly excellent, “and spoken of as being extolled for that which all despise.” The music to “Tarleton's Jigge” is preserved in a MS. in the Public Library, Cambridge (D d. 14, 24). This manuscript is one of six, containing a number of old English tunes, collected and arranged for the lute, by John Dowland, and among them are the music to many of Kemp's Jigs. “Most commonly when the play is done,” says Lupton, in his London and the Countrey Carbonadoed and Quatred into seuerall Characters, 8vo. 1632,) “you shall haue a jig or a dance of all treads: they mean to put their legs to it as well as their tongues.” According to the author of Tarltoris News out of Purgatory, the jig lasted for an hour. The pamphlet, says he, is “only such a jest as his (Tarlton's) jig, fit for gentlemen to laugh at an hour.” [Illustration: 0295]