The sound of the pipe and tabor, and the nasal tones of Master Merriman, soon gathered all the idle folk in the fair round the mountebank’s scaffold. The fool began with their favourite egg-dance; and they stood with gaping mouths to see him hop about on one leg, and then, being blindfolded, dance backwards and forwards between the eggs without touching one of them: their mouths gaped yet wider, as this performer was succeeded by the fire-eater, who, after commencing by the trick of drawing forth from his mouth yard after yard of ribands, as if his stomach had been a riband loom, put a bundle of lighted matches into his mouth, and blew the smoke of the sulphur through his nostrils. Last came the posture-master, whose art consisted in making all sorts of uncouth faces, and exhibiting in a natural but shocking manner every species of deformity and dislocation. Now he showed a huge rising of his left shoulder; now shifted the deformity into the other; now represented a humpback; accompanying these changes of his figure with sundry comical contortions of countenance, to which the crowd responded in roars of laughter. Having thus got them into good humour for his purpose, he went on to imitate the cries and voices of sundry animals and birds; the crow of the cock, the gabble of the geese, the gobble of the turkey, the quaak of the duck, the squeak of the sucking pig, the bleat of the lamb, the grunt of the old sow, and the braying of the ass. The crowd was on the broad grin while he went through these imitations. He now therefore disappeared for a minute, leaving the merriman to amuse them, by way of interlude, with a jocular dance, and returned in robes made of coarse materials to imitate those of a bishop. His figure was stuffed out to Falstaff-like proportions; his hands were crossed with due gravity; he had plumpers in his cheeks; and he forthwith began to intone an anthem with burlesque solemnity. The words were in mockery of the coronation anthem; and the petition for the growth of the King’s beard, and the shaving thereof, was delivered in all those varieties of note which he had before given when mimicking the animals of the farm-yard. He thus excited the mirth of the rabble vastly. He closed this mischievous performance by a comic song about tithes; and, after imitating the squeak of a sucking pig, and the clack of a hen, he produced upon the stage, by sleight of hand, as if from his paunch, a basket filled with curious samples of the small tithe, in which the tenth egg was not forgotten. His place was now taken by the mountebank, who professed to be appointed grand physician to the state, and purifier of the church. The fool stood by his side making all the uncouth faces which he could think of, taken, it must be confessed, most chiefly from the sour _kill-joys_ of the time; and holding a large bundle of printed papers, each headed by a wood-cut, he distributed them down among the people