These were all homely pleasures, and did not require long journeys to see; for our country men and women throughout the reigns of the four Georges were no travellers, and knew little of the world outside their small town or village. As one of them says in the song:

Of their furrin' lands let furriners brag,
With their fifteen names for a puddin' bag;
Let fools go wandering far and nigh,

We stays at whoam, my dog and I.

Many a country squire in the last century had never been thirty miles from home; the roads were so bad, and travelling was both difficult and dangerous. In the country there were wakes and merry-makings, where they could see cock fights, cudgel playing, grinning through a horse collar, running races stitched up in sacks, or catching greased pigs. In the towns there were market days and the fairs, the most renowned of which, Bartholomew Fair, has been well painted for us by Hogarth, 1750. There is a travelling theatre; the actors, in full costume, are exhibiting themselves outside, before playing "The Fall of Bajazet" inside; but are suddenly surprised by the breakdown of their scaffold, and queens, Turks and tumblers, monkeys and merry-andrews descend topsyturvy into a china shop below. At another show, opposite, are to be seen the Temptation of Adam and Eve, and the wooden horse of Troy. A prize-fighter with a broken nose, a pretty female drummer, a tumbler swinging on a slack rope, a juggler with cups and balls, a pickpocket and a couple of simple country cousins, with a bag-piper and a dancing dog make up a busy scene.

The quack doctor was also an important personage, usually to be seen on market days and at fairs. Here he is in 1790, with his monkey and merry-andrew, and his

assistant drawing teeth gratis. Foote, in one of his plays, represents a quack doctor as publicly communicating his theory and practice of medicine thus:

"Diseases are ingendered by a little brown fly, which enters in at our mouths and noses. What, then, is my infallible remedy? I collect, at great expense, spider's eggs, which I administer to my patients. These hatch, and produce spiders. The spiders kill the flies, both are expelled by a dose of medicine, and then I send my patients to the seaside to wash the cobwebs out of their system."

So much for the fairs and market days. Then there were tea gardens in the neighbourhood of London and the larger towns, with music and singing, as Vauxhall, Ranelagh, and Bagnigge Wells, some pictures of which, by Morland and Rowlandson, I exhibit. Then in winter they had skating, in summer ninepins and cricket. Notice particularly this copy of a rare picture, dated 1780. The bat is very different in shape from that now used, and there are only two, not three, stumps to form the wicket. The other lady has been out shooting, and it is plain from this and many other pictures that the ladies led a very open-air life and were fond of out-door sports. Of late years, due to the rapid growth of great towns, our ladies, I am afraid, have led more sedentary lives. But the immense popularity of lawn tennis and the bicycle is restoring to them that out-door exercise, without which there can be no robust health.

Many old pagan festivals still survived a century ago as games and revels. Such were the midsummer fires over which they leaped, and the May-day festivities. And Christmas, with its Lord of Misrule and Twelfth Night revels, and its wassail bowl of spiced ale. Then there were the harvest festivities, very curious. The last load of corn was crowned with flowers and preceded by a figure called a Corn Maiden, made of ears of corn, round