Another not less cruel sport still lives in the tavern sign "Dog and Duck." The birds were put into a small pond and chased by dogs. Watching the frightened creatures dive to escape their pursuers constituted the chief joy of the performance. We may still hear the wild cries of the spectators urging on the dogs, when we read the old rhyme:--
"Ho, ho, to Islington; enough! Fetch Job my son, and our dog Ruffe! For there in Pond, through mire and muck, We'll cry: hay Duck, there Ruffe, hay Duck!"
An old stone sign of such a "Dog and Duck" tavern, dated 1617, can still be seen in London outside of the Bethlehem Hospital in St. George's Field. The popular name of this lunatic asylum is Bedlam--favorite word of Carlyle to designate confusion and chaos.
Here in South London special arenas were built for the spectacle of bear-baiting, and it is no chance that as early as in the time of Richard III the most popular tavern of this quarter was called "The Bear." It stood near London Bridge, and was frequented especially by aristocratic revelers. In these scenes of rough amusements for the people the muse of Shakespeare introduced the gentle dramatic arts. Here his "Henry V" was introduced for the first time, perhaps, with its solemn chorus: "Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?"
Still more than these artificial and butchery sports of the citizen, the real joys of the hunter found their echo in the productions of the sign-painters. There is hardly an English town without a "White Hart Inn." Since the days of Alexander the Great, who once caught a beautiful white hart and decorated his slender neck with a golden ring, since Charlemagne and Henry the Lion, the white hart has been a special favorite of the hunter, whose joys no poet perhaps has sung so charmingly as Shakespeare in these lines of "Titus Andronicus" (II, ii and iii):--
"The hunt is up, the morn is bright and grey, The fields are fragrant, and the woods are green: Uncouple here
The birds chaunt melody on every bush; The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun; The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind, And make a chequer'd shadow on the ground: Under their sweet shade, Aaron, let us sit, And--whilst the babbling echo mocks the hounds, Replying shrilly to the well-tun'd horns, As if a double hunt were heard at once once-- Let us sit down...."