On another occasion, when challenged in company with two others, he announced his companions as being makers of eyes and light. The pious custodes solemnly laid hold of him for flat blasphemy; but when he explained that one of his companions made spectacles and the other candles, of course the watch fell into uncontrollable laughter, as watchmen will do, even at smaller jests than this. He was not always in such seemly society as the above; for we meet with him angering a certain huffing Kate, at a tavern; running up a score for sixteen dozen pots of ale at a country ale-house; bandying wit, at his own inn-door, with beggars, whom he sometimes found a match for him; and, after living for days at other hostelries, getting himself arrested as a Jesuit in disguise, and then refusing to discharge his account, because of the false arrest. At ordinaries he would expose the first he could find to his rascally purpose, to the ridicule of the company; and a finely-dressed gentleman passing down Fleet-street, was sure to have an unpleasant time of it, if he happened to be espied by Tarleton. His wife was as often the victim of his wit as any one else; but she was often as sharp as he, and the smart things said were, like Lady Mary Montague at a “Twitnam Assembly,” more smart than clean. When he was keeping an ordinary in Paternoster-row, he and Mistress Richard were invited out to supper, “and because he was a man noted, she would not go out with him into the street, but entreats him to keep on one side, and she another; which he consented to. But as he went, he would cry out to her and say, ‘Turn this way, wife;’ and anon, ‘On this side, wife,’--so the people flocked the more to laugh at them. But his wife, more than mad angry, goes back again, and almost forswore his company.” They kept together, nevertheless, at the ordinary, where his customers not only found wit in the royal jester, but wit in his mustard, as he proved, to his own satisfaction at least, when he said that mustard and the person dining, resembled “a witty scold meeting another scold; and knowing this scold will scold, begins to scold first: so the mustard, being licked up, and knowing that you will bite it, begins to bite you first!” It must surely have been brighter jokes than this that procured for him invitations to dinner at the houses of aldermen and justices, who thought it well to treat a Queen’s jester, and laugh at jokes that might have been dished up for their liege lady.