actors captured, the audience dispersed, and the seats and the stage righteously smashed into fragments. The players (some of them among the most accomplished of their day) were paraded through the streets in all their stage finery, and clapped into the Gate House and other prisons, whence they were too happy to escape, after much unseemly treatment, at the cost of all the theatrical property which they had carried on their backs into durance vile. This severity, visited in other houses as well as the Cockpit, caused some actors to despair, while it rendered others only a little more discreet. Rhodes, the old prompter at Blackfriars, turned bookseller, and opened a shop at Charing Cross. There he and one Betterton, an ex-under-cook in the kitchen of Charles I., who lived in Tothill Street, talked mournfully over the past, and, according to their respective humours, of the future. The cook's sons listened the while, and one of them especially took delight in hearing old stories of players, and in cultivating an acquaintance with the old theatrical bookseller. In the neighbourhood of the ex-prompter's shop, knots of very slenderly-built players used to congregate at certain seasons. A delegate from their number might be seen whispering to the citizen captain in command at Whitehall, who, as wicked people reported, consented, for a "consideration," not to bring his red-coats down to the Bull or other localities where private stages were erected--especially during the time of Bartholomew Fair, Christmas, and other joyous tides. To his shame, be it recorded, the captain occasionally broke his promise, or the poor actors had fallen short in their purchase-money of his pledge, and in the very middle of the piece, the little theatre would be invaded, and the audience be rendered subject to as much virtuous indignation as the actors.