This paper pellet had not long been printed, when the vexed author might have seen four actors sailing joyously along the Strand. There they are, Master Moore (there were no _managers_ then; they were "masters" till the Georgian era), Master Moore, heavy Foster, mirthful Guilman, and airy Townsend. The master carries in his pocket a royal licence to form a company, whose members, in honour of the King's sister, shall be known as "the Lady Elizabeth's servants;" with permission to act when and where they please, in and about the city of London, unless when the plague shall be more than ordinarily prevalent. There was no present opportunity to touch these licensed companies; and, accordingly, a sect of men who professed to unite loyalty with orthodoxy, looking eagerly about them for offenders, detected an unlicensed fraternity playing a comedy in the old house, before noticed, of Sir John Yorke. The result of this was the assembling of a nervously-agitated troop of offenders in the Star Chamber. One Christopher Mallory was made the scapegoat, for the satisfactory reason that in the comedy alluded to he had represented the devil, and in the last scene descended through the stage, with a figure of King James on his back, remarking the while, that such was the road by which all Protestants must necessarily travel! Poor Mallory, condemned to fine and imprisonment, vainly observed that there were two points, he thought, in his favour--that he had not played in the piece, and had not been even present in the house! Meanwhile the public flocked to their favourite houses, and fortune seemed to be most blandly smiling on "masters," when there suddenly appeared the monster mortar manufactured by Prynne, and discharged by him over London, with an attendant amount of thunder, which shook every building in the metropolis. Prynne had just previously seen the painters busily at work in beautifying the old "Fortune," and the decorators gilding the horns of the "Red Bull." He had been down to Whitefriars, and had there beheld a new theatre rising near the old time-honoured site. He was unable to be longer silent, and in 1633 out came his _Histrio-Mastix_, consisting, from title-page to _finis_, of a thousand and several hundred pages.