* Sept. 13, 1717. Several constables visited Pinkethman's booth in Southwark Fair, and apprehended Pinkethman, with others of his company, just as they had concluded a play, in the presence of near 150 noblemen and gentlemen seated on the stage. They were soon liberated, on making it appear that they were the King's Servants. The Prince visited the booth.
Other exhibitions has the saint had beside his own. Exhibitions, as a nuisance, * from that _corpus sine pectore_, the London common council! "_Do thou amend thy face!_" was the reply of Falstaff to Bardolph, when the owner of the "fiery trigon" inflicted a homily on that "sweet creature of bombast.'" How much more needful, sons of repletion! is reform to you, than the showman, who seldom sees any punch but his own; the Jack-Pudding, who grins wofully for a slice of his namesake; and the "strong man," who gets little else between his teeth but his table! Why not be merry your own way, and let mountebanks be merry theirs? Are license and excess to be entirely on the side of "robes and furrd gowns?"
* In "A Pacquet from Wills, 1701," an actress of "the Playhouse," writing to "a Stroller in the Country," says, "My dear Harlequin, I hoped, according to custom, at the grand revels of St. Bartholomew to have solaced ourselves with roast pig and a bottle. But the master of that great bee-hive, the city, to please the canting, zealous horn- heads, has buzzed about an order there shall be no fair! The chief cause, say the reformers, is the profane drolls ( Whittington to wit) that ridicule the city's majesty, by hiring a paunch-bellied porter at half-a-crown a day, to represent an Alderman in a scarlet gown! when a lean-ribbed scoundrel in a blue jacket, for mimicking a fool, shall have forty shillings!" In 1743, 1750, 1760, 1798, 1825, and 1840, further attempts were made to put down the fair. In 1760 one Birch, (for whom St. Bartholomew had a rod in pickle! ) bearing the grandiloquent title of Deputy City Marshal (!! ) lost his life in a fray that broke out between the suppressing authorities and the fair folk.
The amendment of Bardolph's face (nose!) per se, was not a crying case of necessity; a burning shame to be extinguished with a zeal hot as the "fire o' juniper." It only became so in conjunction with the reformation of Falstaff's morals!