The good or evil arising from the amusements of any class of the people can only be fairly judged by comparing the amusements with those of other classes at the same period; and those who will study the dramas and novels, and especially the newspapers of the last century, will not find more to commend in the manners and pursuits of the upper and middle classes than in those of the lower orders of society, as exemplified in the London fairs. The hand that painted Gin Lane for the contemplation of posterity left an instructive picture of the morals and manners of the upper strata of society in the 'Rake's Progress' and the 'Midnight Conversation.' The amusements of the people partake of the mutability of all mundane matters, and the newspapers of the period show that the London fairs had begun, at the beginning of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, to be regarded by the educated portion of society much less favourably than they had been in earlier times. When St. James's ceased to patronize them, Bloomsbury voted them low, and Cornhill declared them a nuisance. Journalists, having as yet no readers in the slums, and therefore writing exclusively for St. James's, or Bloomsbury, or Cornhill, as the case might be, adapted their tone to the views current in those sections of London society. If we first place a paragraph of the 'Times' of the present day recording a cock-fight or a pugilistic contest, by the side of a report of a similar encounter in a journal of thirty years ago, we shall have no difficulty in understanding why Bartholomew Fair was described by the 'Morning Chronicle' in 1784 in language so different to that used by Pepys and Evelyn a century before. After recounting the misdoings of "Lady Holland's mob," the paragraphist tells his readers that:-- "The elegant part of the entertainment was confined to a few booths. At the Lock and Key, near Cloth Fair, a select company performed the musical opera of the _Poor Soldier_, with Columbine's escape from Smithfield. Mr. Flockton, whose name can never be struck off Bartholomew roll, had a variety of entertainments without and within. The King's conjuror, who takes more money from out the pocket than he puts in, made the lank-haired gentry scratch their pates; the walking French puppet-show had hired an apartment, with additional performers; Punch and the Devil, in his little moving theatre, were performing without doors, to invite the company into the grand theatre. Men with wooden mummies in show-boxes were found straggling about the fair; tall women in cellars, dropping upon their knees to be kissed by short customers; dwarfs mounted on stools for the same civil purposes; and men without arms writing with their feet." The sneering tone, and the disposition to write down the fair, perceptible in this account, are more strongly exhibited in the 'Public Advertiser' of the 5th of September, in the following year:--