Wherever such sports were carried on there must needs spring up a rabble rout who made their living by them: the bearward, the serving man who kept the kennels, fed the dogs, exercised the dogs, fed the bears, looked after the amphitheatre, took the money, and above all provided the drink. In the little lane now called the Bear Garden, there is a small square place which I take to be the survival of an open court in front of the circus. There is here a small tavern: the house itself is not ancient, but I believe that it stands on the site of the house which provided wine and beer for the spectators of the bear baiting. These sports, with others such as wrestling and fighting: these great crowds of people gathering together: the music which accompanied everything: caused the creation of taverns and drinking-places. Another attraction to the place may be only hinted at in these pages. Suffice it to say that all the profligate, all the debauched, all the rowdy, all the lovers of sport among the citizens of London crossed over to Bankside every evening in the summer and every Sunday in the winter, and there they frolicked, drank, sang, quarrelled, fought, and tortured animals to their hearts' content. It is pleasant to think of Bankside and the fields beyond it--the pleasure garden of London. It was easy to get into the open country on every side of the City walls, but there was no place so pleasant as the Lambeth Marsh and the Bankside: none that offered so many and such various attractions. The flag flying over the Theatre proclaimed that a play was forward: the number of those who loved the play more than the baiting increased daily: there was never a time when the citizens did not love the green fields and the woods: and these lay behind Paris Gardens and the Bank, beyond the barking of the dogs and the roar of the crowd and the blare of the music and the stink of the kennels. Every summer evening the river was crowded with the boats taking the people across to the stairs upon the Bank between St. Mary Overies and Old Barge House Stairs: innumerable were the boats. As for the watermen, John Taylor, the water poet, says that there were 40,000 of them plying between Windsor and Gravesend, while the number of people who were carried over every day to the plays on Bankside was three or four thousand. Forty thousand seems an enormous number, but we must remember that there were no docks: that ships were laden and unladen in mid stream by barges and boats: that the Thames was the highway between London and all riverside places; between London and Westminster; between London and Southwark, because even if one lived close to the bridge it was easier and quicker to be taken across by a boat than to walk over the bridge. The conveyance of three or four thousand people across the river every day would not want more than a thousand boats or two thousand watermen: at the same time the loss of their custom, which