The same considerations, which decided Lord Loughborough not to try an action brought by a wager concerning chicken-hazard, made Lord Ellenborough decline to hear a cause where the plaintiff sought to recover money wagered on a cock-fight. "There is likewise," said Lord Ellenborough, "another principle on which I think an action on such wagers cannot be maintained. They tend to the degradation of courts of justice. It is impossible to be engaged in ludicrous inquiries of this sort consistently with that dignity which it is essential to the public welfare that a court of justice should always preserve. I will not try the plaintiff's right to recover the four guineas, which might involve questions on the weight of the cocks and the construction of their steel spurs." It has already been remarked that in all ages the wits of Westminster Hall have delighted in puns; and it may be here added, with the exception of some twenty happy verbal freaks, the puns of lawyers have not been remarkable for their excellence. L'Estrange records that when a stone was hurled by a convict from the dock at Charles I.'s Chief Justice Richardson, and passed just over the head of the judge, who happened to be sitting at ease and lolling on his elbow, the learned man smiled, and observed to those who congratulated him on his escape, "You see now, if I had been an _upright judge_ I had been slaine." Under George III. Joseph Jekyll[30] was at the same time the brightest wit and most shameless punster of Westminster Hall; and such pride did he take in his reputation as a punster, that after the fashion of the wits of an earlier period he was often at considerable pains to give a pun a well-wrought epigrammatic setting. Bored with the long-winded speech of a prosy sergeant, he wrote on a slip of paper, which was in due course passed along the barristers' benches in the court where he was sitting-- "The sergeants are a grateful race, Their dress and language show it; Their purple garments come from _Tyre_, Their arguments go to it." When Garrow, by a more skilful than successful cross-examination, was endeavoring to lure a witness (an unmarried lady of advanced years) into an acknowledgment that payment of certain money in dispute had been tendered, Jekyll threw him this couplet-- "Garrow, forbear; that tough old jade Will never prove a _tender maid_." So also, when Lord Eldon and Sir Arthur Pigott each made a stand in court for his favorite pronunciation of the word 'lien;' Lord Eldon calling the word _lion_ and Sir Arthur maintaining that it was to be pronounced like _lean_, Jekyll, with an allusion to the parsimonious arrangements of the Chancellor's kitchen, perpetrated the _jeu d'esprit_-- "Sir Arthur, Sir Arthur, why what do you mean By saying the Chancellor's _lion_ is _lean_? D'ye think that his kitchen's so bad as all that, That nothing within it can ever get fat?"