London, Volume 1

Knight, Charles

1841

Street Sights.

Street Sights.

 

 

 

In a poem written in

verse burlesque

by Sir William D'Avenant, entitled

The Long Vacation in London,

--(we have already quoted from this curious picture of manners)-there is a very satisfactory enumeration of the principal sights which were presented to the admiring wayfarers of our city at the period when the Restoration had given back to the people some of their ancient amusements, and the councils of the primitive church were no longer raked up, as they were by old Prynne, to denounce bear-leaders and puppet-showmen as the agents of the evil ,--excommunicated persons who were to be dealt with by the strong arm of the law, civil and ecclesiastical.[n.413.1]  It may be convenient in our notice of this large miscellaneous subject if we take D'Avenant's description as a middle point in the history of street sights; looking occasionally, by way of comparison, at the more remarkable of those classes of popular exhibitors who may be called the ancestors, and those who are in the same manner the descendants, of the individual performers of the days of Charles II. The passage in D'Avenant's poem is as follows:--

Now vaulter good, and dancing lass

On rope, and man that cries Hey, pass!

And tumbler young that needs but stoop,

Lay head to heel to creep through hoop;

And man in chimney hid to dress,

Puppet that acts our old Queen Bess,

And man that whilst the puppets play,

Through nose expoundeth what they say;

And white oat-eater that does dwell

In stable small at sign of Bell,

That lift up hoof to show the pranks

Taught by magician, styled Banks;

And ape, led captive still in chain

Till he renounce the Pope and Spain:

All these on hoof now trudge from town

To cheat poor turnip-eating clown.

What a congregation of wonders is here! Hogarth could not have painted his glorious

Southwark

Fair

without actual observation; but here is an assemblage from which a companion picture might be made, offering us the varieties of costume and character which distinguish the age of Charles II. from that of George II. But such sights can only be grouped together now in London upon remarkable occasions. The London of our own day, including its gigantic suburbs, is not the place to find even in separate localities the vaulter, the dancing lass, the conjurer, the tumbler, the puppet-show, the raree-show, the learned horse, or the loyal ape. , for example, is much too busy a place for the wonder-mongers to congregate in. A merchant in Ben Jonson's

Fox

says-

'Twere a rare motion to be seen in Fleet-street.

A motion is another name for a puppet-show. His companion answers,

Ay, in the Term.

years afterwards D'Avenant tells us of his vagabonds, that in the Long Vacation

All these on hoof no triddge from town To cheat poor turnip-eating clown.

The sight-showers, we thus see, were in high activity in the Term, because was then full, When is it now empty? There is no room for their trades. They are elbowed out. We have seen, however, in some half-quiet thoroughfare of , or of Clerkenwell, a dingy cloth spread upon the road, and a ring of children called together at the sound of horn, to behold a dancing lass in all the finery of calico trousers and spangles, and a tumbler with his hoop: and on occasion sixpence was extracted from our pockets, because the said tumbler had his hoop splendid with ribbons, which showed him to have a reverence for the poetry and antiquity of his calling. He knew the line,--

And wear his colours like a tumbler's hoopLove's Labour's Lost..

But the tumbler himself was a poor performer. His merit was not called out. The street passengers had as little to give to him as to the beggars, because they .were too busy to be amused. If the Italian who exhibited before Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth could appear again in our metropolitan thoroughfares, we should pass on, regardless of his

turnings, tumblings, castings, hops, jumps, leaps, skips, springs, gambols, summersets, caperings, and flights; forward, backward, sideways, downward, and upward, with sundry windings, gyrings, and

circumflexions

Laneham's Letter from Kenilworth, 1575.

.

Joseph Clark, the great posture-master, who figured about the period of the Revolution, would have had a much better chance with us. We require powerful stimulants; and he, as it is recorded in the

Philosophical Transactions,

had

such an absolute command of all his muscles and joints, that he could disjoint almost his whole body.

Not a deformity which nature or accident had produced in the most miserable of cripples but Joseph Clark could imitate. Ask for a hunchback, and he straightway had at command. Require the

Fair round belly with good capon lin'd,

and he could produce it without a pillow. He would make his hips invade the place of his back; and it was perfectly easy to him for leg to advance with the heel foremost, and another with the toes. He imposed upon Molins, a celebrated surgeon, so completely, that he was dismissed as an incurable cripple. No tailor could measure him, for his hump would shift from shoulder to the other; and anon he would be perfectly straight and well proportioned. picture of him has been preserved to posterity, but there ought to have been a dozen.

 

D'Avenant has grouped his performers as they had been practically associated together for some centuries before his time. The was not very inferior in dignity to the minstrel; but in time he became degraded into a , and a hocus-pocus. The

man that cries Hey, pass!

was the great star of the exhibition, and the rope-dancer and tumbler and vaulter were his satellites. In a print to the

Orbis Pictus

of Comenius () the juggler and his exhibition are represented with these various attractions. Nor was music wanting to the charm of these street performances. The beautiful air known by the name of

Balance a Straw

was an especial favourite with the rope-dancers, and certainly its graceful movement would indicate that these performances had somewhat more of refinement in them than is commonly supposed to belong to such amusements

416

 for the people. The air is given in Mr. Chappell's collection; but we hope it may still be heard from the chimes of some country church, which have gone on for a century or bestowing their melodies upon thankless ears: more probably, growing out of order, the chimes have been voted a nuisance by the vestry, and are consigned to oblivion, with many other touching remembrances of the past.

The following engraving of a conjurer's booth in exhibits the alliance of the juggler with the tumbler. The feats which the painted cloth exhibits to us

are nothing very remarkable; but Hogarth, in his

Southwark

Fair,

has performances of another character. We have there a vaulter on the slack-rope, and he is no less a person than Signor Violante, who was sometimes honoured with more select spectators than Hogarth has assigned to him. Malcolm, in his

Londinium Redivivum,

tells us, in his notice of ,

Soon after the completion of the steeple, an adventurous Italian named Violante descended from the arches, head foremost, on a rope stretched thence across

St. Martin's Lane

to the Royal Mews: the princesses were present, and many eminent persons.

Hogarth in his print has preserved to us a representation of this sort of rope-flying. A man is thus descending from the church-tower in the background. This adventurer, whose name was Cadman, perished at Shrewsbury in the performance of a similar feat. In the

Gentleman's Magazine

for there is a magnificent copy of verses

On the death of the famous flyer on the rope at Shrewsbury,

full of classical similes. We prefer to transcribe the

417

 tombstone lines upon the poor man, which lines Steevens, in his edition of Hogarth, calls contemptible:--

Let this small monument record the name

Of Cadman, and to future times proclaim

How, by an attempt to fly from this high spire

Across the Sabrine stream, he did acquire

His fatal end. 'Twas not for want of skill,

Or courage, to perform the task, he fell:

No, no--a faulty cord, being drawn too tight,

Hurried his soul on high to take her flight,

Which bid the body here beneath good night.

But there is nothing new under the sun. Neither Cadman nor Violante were the inventors of steeple-flying. As early as the times of Edward VI. there was a precisely similar exhibition. The following description is from a paper in the

Archaeologia,

vol. vii., quoted in Strutt's

Sports and Pastimes:

--

There was a rope, as great as the cable of a ship, stretched in length from the battlements of Paul's steeple, with a great anchor at

one

end, fastened a little before the dean of Paul's house-gate; and when his Majesty approached near the same, there came a man, a stranger, being a native of Arragon, lying on the rope with his head forward, casting his arms and legs abroad, running on his breast on the rope from the battlements to the ground, as if it had been an arrow out of a bow, and stayed on the ground. Then he came to his Majesty and kissed his foot; and so, after certain words to his Highness, he departed from him again, and went upwards upon the rope till he came over the midst of the churchyard, where he, having a rope about him, played certain mysteries on the rope, as tumbling, and casting

one

leg from another. Then took he the rope, and tied it to the cable, and tied himself by the right leg a little space beneath the wrist of the foot, and hung by

one

leg a certain space, and after recovered himself again with the said rope, and unknit the knot, and came down again. Which stayed his Majesty, with all the train, a good space of time.

According to Holinshed, a similar performance took place in the reign of Mary, which cost the life of the performer. These tragedies upon the rope will remind the reader of within the immediate memory of the people of London.

There is something which sounds very much like a reproach to our national character in the fate of Scott, the American diver. We had heard of men who had repeatedly performed the perilous feat of leaping down the fall of some mighty river, rising safely out of the foam of the cataract; and here was a man of the same metal come amongst us, to show what human courage and skill may accomplish. It was a thrilling sight, and not without its moral lessons, to see this American Scott leap from the top of

The tallest pine

Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast

Of some great admiral.

The breathless expectation till he rose again to the surface, and the shout which welcomed him as he threw back his dripping hair, approached the sublime. All his movements in the display of his peculiar talent as a diver were natural and graceful. His hardihood was of no common kind. He maintained, not in the spirit of bravado, but in sober earnestness, that he would leap off the Monument

418

 if there were feet of water below him. The season he chose for diving from a height feet above the parapet of the highest was during an intense frost, when the river was full of ice, and the enormous masses floating with the. tide scarcely appeared to leave a space for his plunge or his rise. He watched his moment, and the feat was performed over and over again with perfect safety. But he had been told, we presume, that the London populace wanted novelty. It was not enough that he should do day by day what no man had ever ventured to do before. To leap off the parapets of the and Waterloo Bridges into the half-frozen river had become a common thing; and so the poor man must have a scaffold put up, and he must suspend himself from its cross-bars by his arm, and his leg, and his neck. Twice was the last experiment repeated; but upon the attempt the body hung motionless. The applause and the laughter, that death could be so counterfeited, were tumultuous; but a cry of terror went forth that the man dead. He perished by administering to a morbid public appetite. Happily executions are no common spectacles, and so a mock was to gratify the holiday curiosity. Every man who looked on that sight went away degraded.

 

The conjurer's trade with us is losing its simplicity. This assertion may appear paradoxical. But the legitimate conjurer,--the man of cups and balls,is a true descendant of the personage, whether called joculator, or gleeman, or tregetour, who delighted our Saxon and Norman progenitors. He had no such dangerous tricks in his catalogue as that of being shot at with real powder and with real ball. He did not blind the spectators by their fears. He was a great

419

 artist, though, in his way;--probably greater than the modern wizards. What are the thimble-riggers of our degenerate day compared with Chaucer's sleight of hand man?-

There saw I eke Coil Tregetour

Upon a table of sycamore,

Playing an uncouth thing to tell;

I saw him carry a windmill

Under a walnut-shell.

With tricks such as this did the Chinese jugglers astonish us some years ago. The juggler is, indeed, of a corporation that has held the same fee-simple in the credulity of mankind during all ages and in all countries. In an interlude of the reign of Elizabeth we have these lines:--

What juggling was there upon the boards! What thrusting of knives through many a nose! What bearing of forms! what holdings of swords! What putting of bodkins through leg and hose!

Mr. Lane, in his interesting work,

The Modern Egyptians,

tells us of the , or conjurer of Cairo, that

in appearance, he forces an iron spike into the boy's throat; the spike being really pushed up into a wooden handle. He also performs another trick of the same kind as this: placing the boy on the ground, he puts the edge of a knife upon his nose, and knocks the blade until half its width seems to have entered.

Amongst the other accomplishments of this gentleman, Mr. Lane inform us,

he puts cotton in his mouth and blows out fire.

How universal must be the art when this, the commonest trick of a clown at a country fair, affords delight on the banks of the Nile! Hogarth has such a man in his

Southwark

Fair

riding a great horse. This was probably a real fire-eater, to whom hot coals in his mouth were a daily bread. We have had no such men since the great Mr. Powell, who, it is said, was honoured with a medal by the Royal Society. The foreigner who was amongst us a few years ago, and was ruined because he would not consent to be entirely roasted in his own oven, and he that shrunk from swallowing real corrosive sublimate, were manifest impositions. Our streets are dull, and require a Powell to enliven them. Where is the mountebank gone? He was a genuine Londoner. He set up his bills

That promis'd cure

Of ague or the tooth-ach,

amidst jokes and compliments which would go farther to cure some diseases than the gravity of the whole . Dr. Andrew Borde, whose

Breviary of Health

was printed in , was a great English mountebank.

Hearne has thus described him :--

Dr. Borde was an ingenious man, and knew how to humour and please his patients, readers, and auditors. In his travels and visits he often appeared and spoke in public, and would often frequent markets and fairs where a conflux of people used to get together, to whom he prescribed; and to induce them to flock thither the more readily, he would make humorous speeches, couched in such language as caused mirth, and wonderfully propagated his fame: and 'twas for the same end that he made use of such expressions in his books as would otherwise (the circumstances not considered) be very justly pronounced

bombast,

; 'Twas from the doctor's method of using such speeches at markets and fairs, that in aftertimes those that imitated the like humorous, jocose language were styled Merry Andrews, a term much in vogue on our stages.

No wonder that so great a scholar and ingenious a man should have left disciples who would emulate his fame, and in centuries produce so illustrious a person as the mountebank of Hammersmith, immortalized in the

Spectator :

--

There is scarcely a city in Great Britain but has

one

of this tribe who takes it into his protection, and on the market-day harangues the good people of the place with aphorisms and receipts. You may depend upon it he comes not there for his own private interest, but out of a particular affection to the town. I remember

one

of these public-spirited artists at Hammersmith, who told his audience that he had been born and bred there, and that, having a special regard for the place of his nativity, he was determined to make a present of

five shillings

to as many as would accept of it. The whole crowd stood agape, and ready to take the doctor at his word; when, putting his hand into a long bag, as every

one

was expecting his crown-piece, he drew out a handful of little packets, each of which he informed the spectators was constantly sold at

five shillings

and sixpence, but that he would bate the odd

five shillings

to every inhabitant of that place: the whole assembly immediately closed with this-generous offer, and took off all his physic, after the doctor had made them vouch for

one

another that there were no foreigners among them, but that they were all Hammersmith men.

Alas! who could find a mountebank at Hammersmith now? We must take the physic without the jest. Newspapers have annihilated the mountebank. Advertisements usurp the office of the Merry Andrew. And thus we flee to Morison's

pills. Was there more credulity in those times when, after a trembling of the earth, an itinerant professor was eminently successful in the sale of a medicine

very good against an earthquake?

We have as much; but the form of the thing is changed,

421

 

The morris-dancers went out before the mountebanks. London has been no place for them for centuries. They still linger in the midland villages; but the tabor and bells have not sat foot in London for many a year. The greatest morris-dancer upon record was Will Kemp, the Liston of his day, who in danced the entire way from London to Norwich; and moreover wrote a book about his dancing, which a learned body has lately republished. The opening passage of this curious pamphlet is descriptive of a state of society such as exists not amongst us now. Kemp was a person of high celebrity in his profession, and respectable in his private life. Imagine such an actor making a street exhibition at the present day, and taking sixpences and groats amidst hearty prayers and God-speeds. There is something more frank and cordial in this scene than would be compatible with our refinements.

The

first

Monday in Lent, the close morning promising a clear day (attended on by Thomas Sly, my taborer, William Bee, my servant, and George Sprat, appointed for my overseer that I should take no other ease but my prescribed order), myself, that's I, otherwise called Cavaliero Kemp, head master of morricedancers, high head-borough of heighs, and only tricker of your trill-lilles and best bell-shangles between Sion and Mount Surrey,

Sion near Brentford, and Mount Surrey by Norwich.

began frolickly to foot it from the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor's of London towards the Right Worshipful (and truly bountiful) Master Mayor's of Norwich.

My setting forward was somewhat before

seven

in the morning; my taborer struck up merrily; and as fast as kind people's thronging together would give me leave, through London I leapt. By the way many good old people, and divers others of younger years, of mere kindness gave me bowed sixpences and groats, blessing me with their hearty prayers and God-speeds.

Being past White Chapel, and having left fair London with all that northeast suburb before named, multitudes of Londoners left not me; but, either to keep a custom which many hold, that Mile-end is no walk without a recreation at

Stratford

Bow with cream and cakes, or else for love they bear toward me, or perhaps to make themselves merry if I should chance (as many thought) to give over my morrice within a mile of Mile-end; however, many a

thousand

brought me to Bow, where I rested awhile from dancing, but had small rest with those that would have urg'd me to drinking.- But, I warrant you, Will Kemp was wise enough: to their full cups kind thanks was my return, with gentlemanlike protestations, as

Truly, sir, I dare not.

Kemp was a player of Shakspere's theatre--a privileged man sanctioned by the Lord Chamberlain's licence-welcomed--into good society--not hunted about from town to town under the terrors of the laws against vagabonds. During the reign of Elizabeth any baron of the realm might license a company of players; but in the year of her successor this questionable privilege was removed, and

interlude players, minstrels, jugglers,--and bear-wards,

were left to the full penalties which awaited

idle persons.

While the people, however, were willing to encourage them, it was not very easy for statutes to put them down; and if there were fewer licensed players, the number of unlicensed, who travelled about with or puppet-shows, were prodigiously increased. The streets of London appear to have swarmed with motions. They were sometimes called

422

. The poor Italian boy who travels to London from his native Apennines, and picks up a few daily pence with his monkey or his mouse, calls his exhibition his . But the puppet-showman, in the palmy days of itinerancy, had a very good comedy to exhibit, which modern farce and pantomime have not much improved upon. The puppet actors, according to Ben Jonson, lived in baskets, and they

were a civil company.

They offer not to fleer or jeer, nor break jests, as. the great players do.

Their master was

the mouth of them all.

But in the hands of a clever mouth their satire and burlesque must have been irresistible. Jonson has given us a fair specimen of the burlesque in his own puppet-show of

Hero and Leander.

Old Pepys did not like the puppet-show; but that is no great matter from the man who calls

A Midsummer Night's Dream

the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.

We believe that they were very good puppets; and the classical story very much improved by being made

a little easy and modern for the times.

The writer of the motion thus explains the scene and the characters:--

As for the Hellespont, I imagine our Thames here; and then Leander I make a dyer's son about Puddle-wharf; and Hero a wench o' the Bank-side, who going over

one

morning to

Old Fish Street

, Leander spies her land at Trig-stairs, and falls in love with her. Now do I introduce Cupid, having metamorphosed himself into a drawer, and he strikes Hero in love with a pint of sherry.

This was rivalled centuries afterwards by the immortal show-woman of the Round Tower at Windsor, who began her explanation of the old tapestry whose worsted told this tragedy of true love, with the startling announcement of

Hero was a nun,

and ended with,

Leander's body was picked up by his Majesty's ship the Britannia, and carried into Gibraltar.

The puppet-show continued to be a real street sight, not only for children, but for

people of quality,

in the reign of Anne. Mr. Powell placed his show under the Piazzas of Covent Garden; and the sexton of complained to the

Spectator,

that when the bell was ringing for daily morning prayers, it was deemed a summons to the puppet-show, and not to the church, The town, according to the same authority, was divided between the attractions of Rinaldo and Armida at the Italian Opera, and Whittington and his Cat in Mr. Powell's exhibition. Powell was an innovator; for, whilst his contemporary puppet-show managers represented the

Old Creation of the World,

and

Noah's Flood,

after the fashion in which the puppet-shows continued the attractions of the ancient mysteries and moralities, Powell introduced a pig to dance a minuet with Punch. All the old fine things have perished. Where can we now go to see

a new motion of the City of Nineveh, with Jonas and the Whale,

which were once to be daily found at Fleet Bridge?[n.422.1]  Punch and the Fantoccini are the only living representations of the puppets. But Punch is still with us and of us. The police legislators tried to exterminate him, but he was too mighty for them. He is the only genuine representative which remains of the old stage. When we hear his genial cry at the corner of some street, and note the chuckle of unforced merriment which comes up from the delighted crowd, we know that he has passed the mortal struggle with the fiend, and that he has conquered him, as the of old conquered. Punch has, however, lost something of his primitive

423

 simplicity. We are not quite sure that the dog is genuine,--but that may be tolerated. There are a great many societies formed amongst us for reviving things which the world had unwisely agreed to forget; and we are not without our hopes that there may be room for an association that would restore us the genuine puppet-show. It is an objection, however, that there is not much left of the black-letter literature of the puppets. Punch in his present shape is probably Italian. From Italy come the puppets that perform the most diverting antics upon a board, to the sound of pipe and drum. But these were once genuine English. We have put together in our engraving the exhibitor of dancing dolls, such as he is represented in Hogarth's

Southwark

Fair,

and the Italian stroller of our own day. Mr. Smith, the late keeper of the prints in the , complains, in his

Cries of London,

that the streets are with these Italian boys; and yet he gives us a most spirited etching of of them. Mr. Smith thought it necessary to be solemn and sarcastic when he had pen in hand; and in that curious farrago

Nollekens and his Times,

he is perfectly scandalized that the old sculptor enjoyed Punch. He gravely adds,

In this gratification, however, our sculptor did not stand alone; for I have frequently seen, when I have stood in the crowd, wise men laugh at the mere squeaking of Punch, and have heard them speak of his cunning pranks with the highest ecstasy.

We are glad to find, upon such grave testimony, that the race of wise men is not extinct.

 

We have some fears that the immigration of Italian boys is declining. We do not see the monkey and the white mice so often as we could wish to do. The ape-bearer is a personage of high antiquity. We have the ape on shoulder in a manuscript years earlier than the date of him who is

Led captive still in chain

Till he renounce the Pope and Spain.

Let us cleave to old customs. What if the monkey of the streets be but a monkey, and his keeper know nothing of the peculiarities which distinguish the many families of his race! What if he be but the commonest of monkeys! Is he not amusing? Does he not come with a new idea into our crowded thoroughfares, of distant lands where all is not labour and traffic--where

a wilderness

of monkeys

sit in the green trees, and throw down the fruit to the happy savages below? And then these Italian boys themselves, with their olive cheeks and white teeth--they are something different from your true London boy of the streets, with his mingled look of cunning and insolence. They will show you their treasures with a thorough conviction that they are giving you pleasure; and if you deny the halfpenny, they have still a smile and a --for they all know that French is a more current coin than their own dialect. We fear the police is hard upon them. We would put in a word for them, in the same spirit of humanity with which our delightful Elia pleaded for the beggars. They, by the way, were amongst the street sights, and we may well be glad to have an opportunity for such quotation:--

The mendicants of this great city were so many of her sights-her lions; I can no more spare them than I could the cries of London. No corner of a street is complete without them. They are as indispensable as the ballad singer; and, in their picturesque attire, as ornamental as the signs of old London. They were the standing morals, emblems, mementos, dial mottos, the spital sermons, the books for children, the salutary checks and pauses to the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry-

Look Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there.

Above all, those old blind Tobits that used to line the wall of

Lincoln's Inn

Garden, before modern fastidiousness had expelled them, casting up their ruined orbs to catch a ray of pity, and (if possible) of light, with their faithful dog-guide at their feet;--whither are they fled? or into what corners, blind as themselves, have they been driven, out of the wholesome air and sun-warmth?

These dim eyes have in vain explored, for some months past, a well-known figure, or part of the figure, of a man who used to glide his comely upper-half over the pavements of London, wheeling along with most ingenious celerity upon a machine of wood--a spectacle to natives, to foreigners, and to children. He was of a robust make, with a florid sailor-like complexion, and his head was bare to the storm and sunshine. He was a natural curiosity--a speculation to the scientific--a prodigy to the simple. The infant would stare at the mighty man brought down to his own level. The common cripple would despise his own pusillanimity, viewing the hale stoutness and mighty heart of this half-limbed giant. Few but must have noticed him: for the accident which brought him low took place during the riots of

1780

, and he has been a groundling so long. He seemed earth-born--an Antseus-and to suck in fresh vigour from the soil which he neighboured. He was a grand fragment--as good as an Elgin marble. The nature which should have recruited his reft legs and thighs was not lost, but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules. I heard a tremendous voice thundering and growling, as before an earthquake,--and casting down my eyes, it was this mandrake reviling a steed that had started at his portentous appearance. He seemed to want but his just stature to have rent the offending quadruped in shivers. He was as the man-part of a centaur, from which the horse-half had been cloven in dire Lapithan controversy. He moved on as if he could have made shift with the yet half body-portion which was left him. The os sublime was not wanting; and he threw out yet a jolly countenance upon the

heavens.

Forty

-and-

two

years had he driven this out-of-door trade, and now that his hair is grizzled in the service, but his good spirits no way impaired, because he is not content to exchange his free air and exercise for the restraints of a poor-house, he is expiating his contumacy in

one

of those houses (ironically christened) of correction. Was a daily spectacle like this to be deemed a nuisance which called for legal interference to remove? or not rather salutary, and a touching object, to the passers-by in a great city? Among her shows, her museums, and supplies for ever-gaping curiosity-(and what else but an accumulation of sights-endless sights--is a great city, or for what else is it desirable?)-was there not room for

one

Lusus

(not

Taturce

, indeed, but)

Accidentium

?

 

Here is an engraving of a raree-show man a years ago. In that box he has stores for the curious, such as the more ancient showman bore about--for that grotesque old fellow was once a modern. In

The Alchymist,

the master of the servant who has filled the house with searchers for the philosopher's stone speculates thus:--

What should my knave advance

To draw this company? he hung out no banners

Of a strange calf with five legs to be seen,

Or a huge lobster with six claws?

And he adds-

May be, he has the fleas that run at tilt

Upon a table.

Tempest's raree-show man (Caulfield tells us he was known by the name of Old Harry) had

the fleas that run at tilt;

and he had also a tame hedgehog and a wonderful snake. Not many years ago

the

industrious

fleas

were exhibited as proper examples to the rising generation. Nor ought the wise and the learned to laugh at these things. If the industry of the fleas be somewhat questionable, there can be no doubt that their instructor had been sufficiently laborious. They say that dancing-bears are made by setting the poor animals upon a heated iron floor; but the habit is retained through that wonderful power

426

 of discipline by which the eye and the voice of man become supreme over the inferior animals. There must have been a thorough inter-communication of ideas between the lords of the creation and the baboon that played on the guitar --the ape that beat his master at chess in the presence of the King of Portugal--the elephant which Bishop Burnet saw play at ball-and the hare which beat the tabor at Bartholomew Fair. Our ancestors delighted in such street sights, and not unwisely so. In the age of Elizabeth and James new countries had been explored; travelling to far distant lands had become common; and thus, he that brought home

a dead Indian

or

a strange fish

was sure to be rewarded.

Were I in England now (as once I was), and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver; there would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man:. when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out

ten

to see a dead Indian.

So learned Trinculo, in the

Tempest,

reprehends our countrymen. But they were not far wrong, if wrong at all. To see these wonders disabused them of many erroneous notions; and if their credulity was sometimes stimulated, their general stock of knowledge was increased. It was believed up to the middle of the century that the elephant had no joints in its legs, and that it never lay down. An elephant was shown about kneeling and lying down, and the belief vanished. Sir Thomas Brown wishes for more such street sights, lest the error should revive in the next generation. Exhibitions of docility, such as elephants offer to us, are good for the multitude. A due appreciation of what may be effected by the combination of perseverance in man and of sagacity in a brute indicates a philosophical spirit in a people. Banks's horse was the great wonder of Elizabeth's time. He and his master have even found a niche in

Raleigh's History of the World:

--

If Banks had lived in older times, he would have shamed all the enchanters in the world; for whosoever was most famous among them could never master or instruct any beast as he did.

This famous animal was a bay gelding, and he was named Morocco. Here is his picture,

427

 preserved also for the admiration of all ages. In

Love's Labour's Lost,

Moth, puzzling Armado with his arithmetic, says,

The Dancing Horse will tell you.

Hall, in his

Satires,

notices

Strange Morocco's dumb arithmetic.

Sir Kenelm Digby informs us that Banks's horse

would restore a glove to the due owner after the master had whispered the man's name in his ear; and would tell the just number of pence in any piece of silver coin, newly showed him by his master.

The Sieur de Melleray, in the notes to his translation of the of Apuleius, tells us that he saw this wonderful horse in the Rue St. Jacques at Paris; and he is astonished that the animal could tell how many francs there were in a crown, but his astonishment was measureless that, the crown being then of a depreciated currency, the horse should be able to tell the exact amount of the depreciation, in that same month of . Banks had fallen among a people who did not quite understand how far the animal and his keeper might employ the language of signs; and he got into trouble accordingly. The better instructed English multitude had been familiar with

Holden's camel,

famed for

ingenuous studies ;

and they had seen Morocco himself go up to the top of . Though they lived in an age of belief in wizards, they had no desire to burn Banks as a professor of the black art. But he had a narrow escape in France; and his contrivance for the justification of his horse's character and his own shows him to have been as familiar with the human as with the brute nature. The story is told by Bishop Morton:--

Which bringeth into my remembrance a story which Banks told meat Frankfort, from his own experience in France among the Capuchins, by whom he was brought into suspicion of magic, because of the strange feats which his horse Morocco played (as I take it) at Orleans, where he, to redeem his credit, promised to manifest to the world that his horse was nothing less than a devil. To this end he commanded his horse to seek out

one

in the press of the people who had a crucifix on his hat; which done, he bade him kneel down unto it; and not this only, but also to rise up again and to kiss it.

And now, gentlemen (quoth he), I think my horse hath acquitted both me and himself;

and so his adversaries rested satisfied; conceiving (as it might seem) that the devil had no power to come near the cross.

The people of Orleans were imperfectly civilized; but Banks and Morocco were destined to fall into barbarous hands. We have no precise record of his fate; but some humorous lines of Jonson have been accepted as containing a tragical truth:--

But 'mongst these TibertsCats., who do you think there was?

Old Banks the juggler, our Pythagoras,

Grave tutor to the learned horse; both which,

Being, beyond sea, burned for one witch,

Their spirits transmigrated to a cat.

It appears to us that Banks's horse, and Holden's camel, and the elephant that expressed his anger when the King of Spain was named, must have had a considerable influence in repressing the bear-baiting cruelties of that age. These were among the street sights sanctioned by royal authority. The patent to Henslowe and Alleyn, the players, constituting them

Masters of the King's

Games,

in , authorises them

to bait, or cause to be baited, our said bears, and others being of our said games, in all and every convenient place or places, at all times meet;

and accordingly the Masters of the Royal Games put down all unlicensed bearwards, and filled the town and country with their performances. This is an illustration of Master Slender's pertinent question to Mistress Ann Page,

Why do your dogs bark so? be there bears i' the town?

It is a blessing that we have now no such street sights as bear-baiting. Bullbaiting, too, is gone: cock-fighting is no more seen. Pugilism has made a faint attempt at revival; but we can part with that too. Are the people, then, to have no amusements accessible to all? Are the street sights to be shouldered out by commerce and luxury, and not a recreation to be left? We answer, let a wise government double and treble the class of healthful exercises, and of intellectual gratifications. Give us new parks if possible. Let us have gardens in which all may freely walk. Open our cathedrals, as the and are opened. Instead of sending all the rare animals which are presented to the Crown to be shown for a shilling by society, have menageries in and the . Take an example from the man who, when the planets are shining brightly out of a serene heaven, plants a telescope in or Yard, and finds enough passengers who are glad to catch glimpses of worlds unseen to the naked eye, and forget for a moment, in the contemplation of the mighty works of Omnipotence, the small things which surround us here. Open the great books of Nature, of Science, and of Art to the people; and they will not repine that the days of conjurers, and puppet-shows, and dancing bears have passed away.

 
 
Footnotes:

[n.413.1] See Prynne's Histrio-Mastix, p. 583.

[n.422.1] Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour.

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