* The Lady Mary, the daughter of a noble Italian family, was
born in Florence, and immured in a nunnery, but eloped with
a Merry Andrew, who taught her his professional tricks. She
danced with great dexterity on the rope, from which (when
urged by the avarice of her inhuman partner to exhibit
during a period of bodily weakness) she fell, and died
instantaneously.
** “The Cloister in Bartholomew Fair, a poem, London.
Thus ends the ramble, Cousin Corydon! of (Thine, as thy spouse's own,) Ingleberry Griskin.
Thanks! worthy chronicler of ancient St. Bartlemy.
Will Pinkethman was a first-rate comedian. The biographer of his contemporary, Spiller, says, “the managers of the Haymarket and Drury Lane always received too much profit from Pinkey's phiz, to encourage anybody to put that out of countenance!” And Pope refers to one popular qualification that he possessed, viz. eating on the stage (as did Dicky Suett, in after days, Dicky Gossip, to wit!) with great comic effect.
“And idle Cibber, how he breaks the laws,
To make poor Pinkey eat with vast applause!”
He was celebrated for speaking prologues and epilogues. * He realised a good fortune by his Puppet-show, and kept a booth at Bartholomew Fair. Two volumes of “Jests” * bear his name. Many of them are as broad as they are long. His love-letter to Tabitha, the fair Quakeress, signed “Yea and Nay, from thy brother in the light,” is wickedly jocose.
Thus Bartholomew Fair, in 1701, boasted its full complement of mimes, mountebanks, vaulters, costermongers, *** gingerbread women, (“ladies of the basket!”) puppet-shows, **** physiognoscopography,—
* Particularly “The New Comical Epilogue of Some-Body and
No-Body, spoken by way of Dialogue between Mr. Pink-ethman
and Jubilee Dicky” (Norris, so christened from his playing
Beau Clincher in Farquhar's Trip to the Jubilee.)
** “Pinkethman's Jests, or Wit Refin'd, being a new year's
gift for young gentlemen and ladies, 1721, First and Second
Parts.'7 A fine mezzotinto portrait of Pinkethman,
represents him in a laced coat and a flowing wig, holding in
his hand a scroll, on which is inscribed, “Ridentibus
arrident Vultus
*** Archdeacon Nares defines a costard-monger, or coster-
mon-ger, to be “a seller of apples, one who generally kept a
stall,”
**** “Here are the rarities of the whole Fair,
Pimperle-Pimp, and the wise Dancing Mare;
Here's Vienna besieg'd, a rare thing,
And here's Punchinello, shewn thrice to the King.
Ladies mask'd to the Cloisters repair,
But there will be no raffling, a pise on the May'r!”
From Playford's Musical Companion, 1701.
—Punches, and Roast Pig. * But its Drama was in abeyance. ** The elite of Pye-Corner, Gilt-spur Street, and the Cloth-quarter, preferred Pinkethman's Medley and Mr. Barnes's Rope-dancers, to “The Old Creation of the World New Revived,” with the intrigues of Lucifer in the Garden of Eden,—