Nero's tameness and docility made him a public favourite, but the "lion," _par excellence_, of Wombwell's show, after the lion-baitings at Warwick, was Wallace. At the time when the terrible death of the lion-tamer, Macarthy, had invested the subject with extraordinary interest, a narrative appeared in the columns of a metropolitan morning journal, purporting to relate the experiences of "an ex-lion king," in which the story of these combats was revived, but in a manner not easily reconciled with the statement of the man who communicated his reminiscences to the "special commissioner" of the journal in question, that he knew the animals and their keeper. "Did you ever," the ex-lion king was reported to have said, "hear of old Wallace's fight with the dogs? 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 as 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 every seat was taken, 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." According to the newspaper reports of the time, two of these lion-baitings took place; and some vague report or dim recollection of the events as they actually occurred seems to have been in the mind of the "ex-lion king" when he gave the preceding account of them. The combats were said to have originated in a bet between two sporting gentlemen, and the dogs were not a dozen mastiffs, but six bull-dogs, and attacked the lion in "heats" of three. The first fight, the incidents of which were similar in character to those described in the foregoing story, was between Nero and the dogs, and took place in July, 1825; at which time the menagerie was located in the Old Factory Yard, in the outskirts of Warwick, on the road to Northampton. This not being considered satisfactory and conclusive, a second encounter was arranged, in which Wallace, a younger animal, was substituted for the old lion, with very different results. Every dog that faced the lion was killed or disabled, the last being carried about in Wallace's mouth as a rat is by a terrier or a cat.