A Performing Hare. 
161 
was kept in the company of the hare for the purpose of 
being periodically pommelled for the amusement of the 
spectators. If he was so retained, we may imagine 
without much difficulty what the reflections of the un¬ 
fortunate dog may have been, both upon the providential 
working of nature and upon the humanity of his owner. 
Ben Jonson includes a similar performing animal in his 
list of curiosities which were exhibited at Bartholomew 
Fair:— 
“ Waspe. I have been at the eagle, and the black wolf, and the bull 
with the five legs—he was a calf at Uxbridge Fair two years agone— 
and at the dogs that dance the morrice, and the hare of the tabor; and 
mist him at all these! Sure this must needs be some fine sight that 
holds him so, if it have him.” {Bartholomew Fair, v. 3.) 
Mrs. Palliser ( Historic Devices , 1870, p. 236) tells us 
that one of the many emblems adopted by Mary, Queen 
of Scots, and embroidered by her during her captivity, 
was a lion taken in a net, and hares wantonly passing over 
him, with the words, Et lepores devicto insultant leone — 
“Even hares trample on the conquered lion.” Of this 
device Alciati gives a representation in his work on 
emblems. To this drawing Shakspeare possibly refers. 
Philip Faulconbridge says, tauntingly, to Austria :— 
“ You are the hare of whom the proverb goes, 
Whose valour plucks dead lions by the beard.” 
( King John, ii. 1,127.) 
Babbits were plentiful in all parts of England. 
William Lambarde, in his Perambulation of Eabbit 
Kent , writes of that county, in 1576:— 
“ Parkes of fallow deere, and games of gray conies, it maintaineth 
many, the one for pleasure, and the other for profit, as it may well 
appear by this, that within memorie almost the one halfe of the first 
sorte be disparked, and the number of warreyns continueth, if it do not 
increase daily. As for red deere, and blacke conies, it nourisheth them 
not, as having no forest, or great walks of waste grounde for the one, 
M 
