This complacent individual had his prototype during the very period which we are considering. He was an artistic gentleman named Crawley, the happy manager of a puppet show which used to bring joy into the hearts of the merry people thronging the famous Bartholomew Fair. One fine day, as the manager was standing outside of his booth, he was put into a flutter of excitement by the approach of the mighty Betterton, in company with a country friend. The actor offered several shillings for himself and rustic as they were about to enter the show, but this was too much for Crawley. He saw the chance of his life, and took advantage of it. "No, no, sir," he said to "Old Thomas," with quite the patronising air of an equal, "we never take money of one another!" Betterton did not see the matter in the same light, and, indignantly throwing down the silver, stalked into the booth without so much as thanking the proprietor of the puppets. What a Bedlam of a place Bartholomew must have been, with its noise, its gew-gaws, bad beer, cheap shows, and riotous visitors. Ned Ward, to whose descriptions modern readers are indebted, partly through the aid of John Ashton,[A] for many a glimpse of old-time London life, has left us a vivid picture of the fair as it appeared to him. The entrance to it, he says, was like unto a "Belfegor's concert," with its "rumbling of drums, mixed with the intolerable squalling of catcalls and penny trumpets." Nor could the sense of smell have been much better catered to than that of hearing, owing to the "singeing of pigs and burnt crackling of over-roasted pork." Once within the enclosure he saw all sorts of remarkable things, including the actors, "strutting round their balconies in their tinsey robes and golden leather buskins;" the rope-dancers, and the dirty eating-places, where "cooks stood dripping at their doors, like their roasted swine's flesh." Ward also looked on at several comedies, or "droles," being enacted in the grounds, and, after coming to the conclusion that they were like "State fireworks," and "never do anybody good but those that are concerned in the show," he repaired to a dancing booth. Here he had the privilege of watching a woman "dance with glasses full of liquor upon the backs of her hands, to which she gave variety of motions, without spilling." [Footnote A: See Ashton's "Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne."] All this may have a curious interest, but it looks a trifle inconsistent, does it not, to lament the unjustness of connecting puppet entertainments and the like with the stage, and then deliberately devote space to the mysteries of Bartholomew Fair? It is more to the purpose to speak of the two theatres which claimed the attention of London playgoers in the year 1703--the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields.