‘George Wombwell was at very low water, and not knowing how to get his head up again, he thought of a fight between an old lion he had sometimes called Wallace, sometimes Nero, and a dozen of mastiff dogs. Wallace was tame as a sheep—I knew him well—I wish all lions were like him. The prices of admission ranged from a guinea up to five guineas, and had the menagerie been three times as large it would have been full. It was a queer go, and no mistake! Sometimes the old lion would scratch a lump out of a dog, and sometimes the dogs would make as if they were going to worry the old lion, but neither side showed any serious fight; and at length the patience of the audience got exhausted and they went away in disgust. George’s excuse was, “We can’t make ’em fight, can we, if they won’t?” There was no getting over this; and George cleared over two thousand pounds by the night’s work.’ In this account two different animals are confounded; the old lion, whose name was Nero, and a younger, but full-grown one, named Wallace. The blunder is strange and unaccountable in one who professes to have known the animals and their keeper, and renders it probable that he is altogether in error about the fight he describes. The newspapers and sporting magazines of the period—about fifty years ago—describe two lion-baitings, which took place in Wombwell’s menagerie in the Old Factory Yard, at Warwick; and some vague report or dim recollection of them seems to have been in the mind of the ‘ex-lion-king,’ when he dictated the graphic narrative for the morning journal. The fights were said to have originated in a bet between two sporting gentlemen, and the dogs were not mastiffs, but bull-dogs. The first fight, the incidents of which were similar in character to those described by the ‘ex-lion-king,’ was between Nero and the dogs; and, this not being considered satisfactory, a second encounter was arranged, in which Wallace was substituted for the old lion, with very different results. Every dog that faced the lion was killed or disabled, the last that did so being carried about in the lion’s mouth as a rat is by a terrier or a cat.