It will be remembered that against all fools, and especially against those introduced on the stage, Sir Philip Sidney made eloquent protest; and all that Puttenham could advance in support of the professional household jester, was that something amusing was to be found in listening to the pretended foolishness of a jester, who had the wit to be wise when he chose so to direct it. The stage fool expired in 1662, in a prologue spoken by a “fool.” The play is a long-since forgotten piece called ‘Thorney Abbey,’ and the motley speaker of the prologue affects to reproach the author for writing a drama with a king and court in it, and omitting the time-honoured character of the jester. Meanwhile, the buffoon was a prominent character, not only at court, but in corporations, where he measured out gaiety for the mayor and his guests; and in great households, when, for all his license, he sometimes got whipped for telling stories rather too coarse, in presence of ladies who could listen to a great amount of that sort of thing without blushing. We find him also in taverns, where he amused the topers by his rude jests and ruder minstrelsy, just as Dionysius, in his exile, is said to have done, when he enacted buffoon in a barber’s shop, for his daily bread; and finally, the buffoon was _that_, and bully too, in other establishments open to the public, but less favourably considered by the law. We leave these, to follow more exclusively the court and household fool. The office of the jester was one which, says Fuller, in his ‘Holy State,’ “none but he that hath wit can perform; and none but he that wants it, _will_ perform.” There is little doubt of this, for wit had its miseries, as Lodge graphically pointed out, in 1599, in a book which, under the title of ‘Wit’s Misery,’ has especial reference to this subject. The author, after pointing out the immoderate and inordinate jollity which was the stock-in-trade of the fool,--his comeliness of person, and his courtliness of dress,--adds that, after all, he was more of an ape than a man, and that his chief duties were to study the coining of bitter jests, to practise quaint and antique motions, to sing immodest songs, to laugh intemperately on very small occasion for it, and, when the wine was in his head, to mouth and gibe at all around him. The fool, says Lodge, “dances about the house, leaps over tables, outskips men’s heads, trips up his companions’ heels, burns sack with a candle, and hath all the feats of a lord of misrule in the country; feed him in his humour, you shall have his heart; in mere kindness, he will hug you in his arms, kiss you on the cheek, and, rapping out a horrible oath, cry, ‘God’s soul, Tom, I love you; you know my poor heart; come to my chamber for a pipe of tobacco; there lives not a man in this world that I more honour.’ In the ceremonies, you shall know his courting; and it is a special mark of him at the table, he sits and makes faces. Keep not this fellow company; for in