Cock-fighting was a favourite diversion with the Romans, and we find continual traces of it during their occupation here. Fitz-Stephen says, it was the sport of schoolboys in his time; but as they grew up it seems the taste adhered to them. That sturdy bluebeard-king, Henry VIII., though always ready to chop off the heads of his subjects, felt his heart melt at the miseries of the cocks, and made edicts against cock-fights, yet with the inconsistency that marked his other tastes built a cock-pit unto himself at Whitehall. James I., also, was a great amateur. Though habitually suppressed by various sovereigns, the evil would always break out again, till it was finally abolished by an Act of Parliament in the 12 & 13 Queen Victoria. In Staffordshire, and other counties where this sport is still practised “on the sly,” the FIGHTING COCKS is a favourite sign. The cock occurs in innumerable combinations with all kinds of heterogeneous objects, many of which seem merely selected for their oddity: among the most explicable is the Cock and Bottle, of which we have offered a solution, (p. 207) and which again occurs in the following title:-- “JUST PUBLISHED, “A full account of the Life and Visions of Nicholas Hart who has every year in his Life past, on the 5th of August, fall’n into a Deep Sleep and cannot be awaked till 5 Days and Nights are expired, and then gives a surprising Relation of what he hath seen in the other World. Taken from his own mouth in September last; after he had slept 5 days in St Bartholomew’s Hospital, the August before. By William Hill, of Lincoln’s Inn. The Truth of all which the said Nicholas Hart hath attested under his Hand, the 3d Day of August 1711, before several credible Witnesses, and declared his Readiness to take oath of the same. He began to sleepe as usual the 5th Day of this instant August 1711 at Mr Dixies at the Cock and Bottle in Little Britain. Entered according to Law. Printed for J. Baker, at the Black Boy, in Paternoster Row, price 2d.”[295] This same book, under the title of “Life and Visions of William Hart, in which are particularly described the state of the Blessed Spirits in the Heavenly Canaan, and also a Description of the Condition of the Damned in a State of Punishment, etc., by Will. Hill, senior of Lincoln’s Inn, London,” is still sold as a chapbook by the “running stationers.” The _Spectator_ did not believe in Nicholas Hart, and introduced the subject to the public with his usual humour in No. 191. Hart seems to have tested the truth of the proverb which says, that fortune comes whilst we are sleeping, for he certainly made more by sleeping than many others by waking. Stow tells a similar story of one William Foxley, potmaker to the mint, who slept full fourteen days and fifteen nights, and when he woke up “was in all points found as if he had slept but one night.”