BEARS. 165 



arm to tte company, ' that I am a kind of taurine man, and must, 

 therefore, be naturally addicted to the sport.' " 



That the sport sank to a very low ebb is evident from a letter 

 in liotes and Queries for 1871, wherein the writer remarks : " I was 

 never a witness of a bear-bait, but I well remember a poor brute 



who was kept alive for this sole purpose at F in Lancashire. 



He was confined, as a general rule, in a small back yard, where 

 sightless, dirty, stinking, and perhaps half-starved, his sole and 

 constant exercise appeared to be moving his head and forequarters 

 from side to side. When taken to other villages to be baited, his 

 advent there was announced by a wretched fiddler, who walked 

 before him and the bear- ward. Upon one occasion, the story goes 



that he and a second champion of the like kind, arrived in W on 



the wakes-day, before the evening church service was completed. 

 This, however, was rapidly brought to a close by the beadle calling 

 to the preacher from the church door : ' Mestur, th' bear's come, 

 and what's more, there's two of 'em.' This freedom of speech in 

 a holy place is less to be wondered at when it is known that the 

 good rector and a party from the rectory usually witnessed the 

 bear-bait from the churchyard adjoining the village green." 



In Doctor Giles Fletcher's treatise on Russia, to which country 

 he went as ambassador from Queen Elizabeth to the Emperor 

 Theodore in 1588, which is published in " Purchas: his Pilgrimes," 

 1625, with the quaint note, "I have in some places contracted, in 

 others mollified the biting, and moi-e bitter stile, which the author 

 useth of the Russian government, that I might do good at home 

 without harme abroad" (which careful consideration might be 

 followed by editors at the present day), there is a description of 

 the beare-bayting enjoyed by the emperor, which shows the kind 

 of sport the Russians loved in those days. " One other special 

 recreation is the fight with wild beares, which are caught in pits 

 or nets, and are kept in barred cages for that purpose, against 

 the emperor be disposed to see the pastime. The fight with the 

 beare is on this sort. The man is turned into a circle walled 

 round about, where he is to quite him self e as well as he can, for 

 there is no way to flye out. When the beare is turned loose, he 

 commeth upon him with open mouth ; if at the first push he misse 

 his ayme, so that the beare come within him, he is in great 



