with a scented bill of octavo size, which is generally, in addition, the means of advertising the goods and inventions of an individual perfumer.  Attempts to follow Parisian example, and to make the playbill at once a vehicle for general advertisements and a source of amusing information upon theatrical subjects, have been ventured here occasionally, but without decided success.  From time to time papers started with this object under such titles as the “Opera Glass,” the “Curtain,” the “Drop Scene,” &c., have appeared, but they have failed to secure a sufficiency of patronage.  The playgoer’s openness to receive impressions or information of any kind by way of employment during the intervals of representation, has not been unperceived by the advertisers, however, and now and then, as a result, a monstrosity called an “advertising curtain” has disfigured the stage.  Some new development of the playbill in this direction may be in store for us in the future.  The difficulty lies, perhaps, in the gilding of the pill.  Advertisements by themselves are not very attractive reading, and a mixed audience cannot safely be credited with a ruling appetite merely for dramatic intelligence.

CHAPTER VI.

STROLLING PLAYERS.

It is rather the public than the player that strolls nowadays.  The theatre is stationary—­the audience peripatetic.  The wheels have been taken off the cart of Thespis.  Hamlet’s line, “Then came each actor on his ass,” or the stage direction in the old “Taming of the Shrew” (1594), “Enter two players with packs on their backs,” no longer describes accurately the travelling habits of the histrionic profession.  But of old the country folk had the drama brought as it were to their doors, and just as they purchased their lawn and cambric, ribbons and gloves, and other raiment and bravery of the wandering pedlar—­the Autolycus of the period—­so all their playhouse learning and experience they acquired from the itinerant actors.  These were rarely the leading performers of the established London companies, however, unless it so happened that the capital was suffering from a visitation of the plague.  “Starring in the provinces” was not an early occupation of the players of good repute.  As a rule, it was only the inferior actors who quitted town, and as Dekker contemptuously says, “travelled upon the hard hoof from village to village for cheese and buttermilk.”  “How chances it they travel?” inquires Hamlet concerning “the tragedians of the city”—­“their residence both in reputation and profit were better both ways.”  John Stephens, writing in 1615, and describing “a common player,” observes, “I prefix the epithet ‘common’ to distinguish the base and artless appendants of our City companies, which oftentimes start away into rustical wanderings, and then, like Proteus, start back again into the City number.”  The strollers were of two classes, however.  First, the theatrical