Johnson and Lee commenced the season of 1843 with several members of the Pavilion company in their fair _corps_; but they attended fewer fairs than in any previous year, and in 1844 their theatre appeared only at Greenwich, Enfield, and Croydon. In the following year, it was burned, while standing in a field at Dartford, and the proprietors, not being insured, suffered a loss of seventeen hundred pounds. Nothing was saved but the parade waggon, which was dragged away before the flames reached it, and, with the scene waggon and other effects which had been bought of Haydon in 1838, formed the nucleus of the new theatre with which the proprietors opened the fair campaign of 1847. Henry Howard joined the travelling company in that year at Ealing Fair, on the closing of the Standard. During the latter part of their career as proprietors of a travelling theatre, the successors of Richardson found it more profitable to conduct their business on the system, since adopted by Newsome and Hengler with their circuses, of locating the theatre for two or three weeks at a time in some considerable town, than to wander from fair to fair, staying at each place only three or four days. At the present day, the circuses just named draw good houses, as a rule, for three months; but a quarter of a century ago this was not thought practicable, and in 1849, when Johnson and Lee erected their theatre at Croydon (in the Fair Field, but some time before the fair), they did not deem it expedient to extend their stay beyond three weeks. The company was drawn chiefly from the minor theatres of the metropolis, and included Leander Melville, Billington, Seaman, Phillips, Mrs. Barnett, Mrs. Campbell, and Miss Slater. _The Stranger_ was selected for the first night, and drew a good audience, as it invariably does, wherever it is played. Under the able and judicious management of Nelson Lee, and with a change of performances every night, good business was done to the last. The experiment was repeated with equal success at Uxbridge and Reading. Another step towards the extinction of Bartholomew Fair was taken this year by the exclusion from Smithfield of shows of every description; a step which would have been at least consistent, if the civic authorities had not made arrangements for the standing of shows of all kinds on a large piece of ground adjoining the New North Road, called Britannia Fields, near the site of the Britannia theatre. If the suppression of the fair had been sought on the ground of its interference with the trade and traffic of the city, this step would have been intelligible; but the moral grounds upon which it was urged served to cover with ridicule the removal of what was alleged to be a hot-bed of vice from Smithfield to Hoxton. What right had the corporation to demoralise the dwellers in one part of the metropolis, in order to preserve from further contamination the inhabitants of another part?