Perhaps the same change would suit the wandering players who are to be found in these last years of the nineteenth century, travelling from one third-class hotel to another, and wondering whether they will ever make enough money to return home and sun themselves on the New York Rialto.
Humble as they were in the time of Queen Anne, her Government saw fit to subject the strollers to what might be called police regulation, and the Master of the Revels, who was a censor of plays and a supervisor-in-general of theatrical matters, had to issue an imposing order setting forth that whereas "several Companies of Strolling Actors pretend to have Licenses from Noblemen,[A] and presume under that pretence to avoid the Master of the Revels, his Correcting their Plays, Drolls, Farces, and Interludes: which being against Her Majesty's Intentions and Directions to the said Master: These are to signifie That such Licenses are not of any Force or authority.

There are likewise several Mountebanks Acting upon Stages, and Mountbanks on Horseback, Persons that keep Poppets, and others that make Shew of Monsters, and strange Sights of Living Creatures, who presume to Travel without the said Master of the Revels' Licence," &c.

&c.

The whole pronunciamento went to show that the despised strollers were not beneath the notice of a lynx-eyed Government.
[Footnote A: A survival of the days when noblemen often had their own companies of actors, and were empowered to regulate the performances of these dramatic servants.] It is curious that the functionary to whom was assigned the important critical duty of revising plays should also be obliged to concern himself with the doings of puppets and country "side shows." Yet before the law there was very little if any difference between a performance of "Hamlet" by the great Betterton, and an exhibition of the marital infelicities of Punch and Judy.

Are matters so much better now that we can afford to laugh at the incongruity?
Do not theatres devoted to the "legitimate" and dime museums, the homes of triple-pated men, human corkscrews and other intellectual freaks, come under the same police supervision, and rank one and all within the same classification as "places of amusement ?" Nay, to go further and fare worse, do not some of these very freaks regard themselves as fellow-workers in the dramatic vineyard made so fertile through the toil of a Booth, a Mansfield or a Terry?
The writer has himself heard the manipulator of a marionette troupe (whose wife, by-the-way, posed in a curio hall as a "Babylonian Princess") speak of Sir Henry Irving as "a brother professional." This complacent individual had his prototype during the very period which we are considering.