This remarkable man was born in 1742, at Newcastle-under-Lyme, where his father carried on the business of a cabinet maker. He received little or no education--no uncommon thing at that time,--and, having worked a few years with his father, enlisted in a cavalry regiment. His imposing appearance, being over six feet in height, with the proportions of a Hercules, and the voice of a Stentor, attracted attention to him; and his capture of a standard at the battle of Emsdorff, made him one of the celebrities of his regiment. While serving in the army, he learned many feats of horsemanship from an itinerant equestrian named Johnson, and often exhibited them for the amusement of his comrades. On his discharge from the army, being presented by General Elliot with a horse, he bought another in Smithfield, and with these two animals gave the open air performances in Lambeth, which have been mentioned. CHAPTER IX Edmund Kean--Mystery of his Parentage--Saunders's Circus--Scowton's Theatre--Belzoni--The Nondescript--Richardson's Theatre--The Carey Family--Kean, a Circus Performer--Oxberry, the Comedian--James Wallack--Last Appearance of the Irish Giant--Miss Biffin and the Earl of Morton--Bartholomew Fair Incidents--Josephine Girardelli, the Female Salamander--James England, the Flying Pieman--Elliston as a Showman--Simon Paap, the Dutch Dwarf--Ballard's Menagerie--A Learned Pig--Madame Gobert, the Athlete--Cartlich, the Original Mazeppa--Barnes, the Pantaloon--Nelson Lee--Cooke's Circus--The Gyngell Family With the present century commenced a period of the history of shows and showmen specially interesting to the generation which remembers the London fairs as they were forty or fifty years ago, and to which the names of Gyngell, Scowton, Samwell, Richardson, Clarke, Atkins, and Wombwell have a familiar sound. It introduces us, in its earliest years, to the celebrated Edmund Kean, "the stripling known in a certain wayfaring troop of _Atellanæ_ by the name of Carey," as Raymond wrote, and whom we find performing at the London fairs, sometimes tumbling in Saunders's circus, and sometimes playing juvenile characters in the travelling theatres of Scowton and Richardson. The early life of this remarkable man is as strange as any that has ever afforded materials for the biographer, and the mystery surrounding his parentage as inscrutable a problem as the authorship of the letters of Junius.