Religious zealotry, strenuous and stubborn, however narrow, had fostered, and parliamentary enactments had warranted, hostility of the most uncompromising kind to the player and his profession.

To many he was still, his new liberty and privileges notwithstanding, but "a son of Belial"-- ever of near kin to the rogue and the vagabond, with the stocks and the whipping-post still in his immediate neighbourhood, let him turn which way he would.
And then, certainly, his occupation had its seamy side.

With this the satirists, who loved censure rather for its wounding than its healing properties, made great play.

They were never tired of pointing out and ridiculing the rents in the stroller's coat; his shifts, trials, misfortunes, follies, were subjects for ceaseless derision.

What Grub Street and "penny-a-lining" have been to the vocation of letters, strolling and "barn-strutting" became to the histrionic profession--an excuse for scorn, underrating, and mirth, more or less bitter.
Still strolling had its charms.