Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/375

 12 S.X.APKIL 22, 1922.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 305 Even if cunning and judicious industry is required in the scenario, art itself should lie in fleeing all art, and nature should alone be mis- tress. The Poet should then be his own actor, should be excited and lament as if he were on the stage himself. Exclamations should fall from his pen and the stress of passion alone should be the guide of the entire action. Not a word out of time, not an expression out of place-^-every- thing vibrant, everything opportune this is the real play on the stage and the spectator, carried out of himself, becomes unconsciously the supporter or accuser of the characters, (ii. 132.) The short series of notes given above will be sufficient to indicate the importance and originality of this treatise. The ground has been already prepared for the dramatic liberty preached and, to some extent, realized by the Romantics. Among the precursors of this revival Gian Rinaldo Carli must take an important place. H. QTJIGLEY. MIDDLESEX JUSTICES, 1745. BY records just made available it is seen that in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the Middlesex Grand Jury present a remonstrance against the riotous " daily assembly of strangers and foreigners, as Scotch, Irish, French, and many vagrant Jews, as well as English, in a place called Rosemary Lane in the Parish of St. Mary's, Whitechapel," they are in very natural fear that these "tumultuous people" were not only " forestalling " English traders but might foment disloyal disturbances. In another respect the wheel comes round full circle the matter of pleasure fairs, now once again uprising in several of the lower suburbs of London and the larger English cities. The Middlesex Justices looked upon these generally rough shows as offensive to public morality and con- venience ; and they bluntly reminded the organizers that they were " rogues and vagabonds," subject to a forfeiture of 50. People stayed at them (as they do now, and in leading thoroughfares) until past 11 o'clock at night ; and great numbers of the lawless class stayed until 3 or 4 in the morning, and then frequently assembled in bodies, " bellowing and knocking at doors, ringing bells, and singing obscene songs." Indeed, their Worships, in a representation to Lord Hardwicke, the Lord High Chan- cellor, declared themselves " satisfied the permission and continuance of these fairs must destroy the little virtue which is left among all the lower sort of people." Among the eight fairs in London cited by the Justices as occasions of crime, one of the most notorious was Mile End Fair ; and among the worst on the outer fringe of London was Bow Fair, otherwise the Green Goose Fair. Bow Fair, it may be mentioned here, was held for many years on the west of what is now Fairfield Road r from Bow Road to the present Great Eastern Railway and North London Railway Stations of the region. The fair was only abolished in 1829, after the exhibition of sustained force to restrain inveterately disorderly and disreputable elements comin'g from along-shore and Whitechapel-Bethnal Green. It is still a common error to locate the old Bow Fair on the land now known as the Grove Park Estate, the Grove Park Recreation Ground, and the Tramways Car- sheds. In the heyday of the fair, the man- sion marked on Joel Gascoyne's map of Queen Anne's time surrounded by the remains of an elaborate terraced garden and a spinney was used by a school of distinction ; and the proprietors were con- stant in their complaints of the bacchanalia practised on the adjacent field. As local legends have it, Dick Turpin who died on the gallows at York in 1739, at the age of 34, for stealing a black mare and foal was a dissolute and disorderly butcher - boy in Whitechapel before he developed into a particularly mean thief and high- wayman. He found the rapturous, not to say, rowdy, pleasures of Bow Fair much more to his personal taste than the delights of more fashionable resorts in which his Whitechapel predecessor, Claude Duval, figured with some success as a gentleman ; and the pleasure gardens of Bow where Master Pepys sometimes finished a day's jaunt were no longer visited by quality folk or by those who wished to be so re- garded. The road thither was increasingly unsafe in Georgian times for unarmed persons ; and many venturous people came rather by boat down Thames, and so through the Lea Estuary to Bow Bridge in the high summer. Fairs, gaming places, ginshops and the exuberant recreations of the numberless pleasure gardens, all came in for the special attention of the Middlesex Justices in 1745, for when the news of the Battle of Culloden arrived " London all over was in a perfect uproar of joy " (although the common people did not really know or care what was passing in