A most comfortably clad set of plantigrade creatures, as fond, most of them, of fruits as they are of flesh. No creatures are more amusing in zoological gardens to children, who wonder at their climbing powers. Who is so heartless as not to have pitied the roving polar bear, caged, on a sultry July day, in a small paddock with a puddle, and wandering about restlessly in his few feet of ground, as the well-dressed mob lounged to hear the military band performing in the Regent's Park Zoological Gardens? Even young bears have an adult kind of look about them. The writer remembers the manner of one, disappointed at its bread sap, most of the milk of which had been absorbed. A little girl standing by, not two years old, perfectly understood what the little creature was searching for, and, looking up, said "milka," or something closely resembling it. We recently saw a little brown bear, on board a Russian ship at Leith. He acted as a capital guard. The little creature had a grown-up face, more easily observed than described.
Bear hams, we speak from rare experience, are truly excellent. Bears, in our early London days, were kept by many hairdressers and perfumers. The anecdote or passage from Dickens's "Humphrey's Clock" is very characteristic.
In one of Wilkie's pictures the brown bear is figured on its way with its owners to the parish beadle's "house of detention." We remember the very bear and its owners. A fine chapter might be written on the animals that used to be led about the country by wandering foreigners. Our first sight of guinea-pigs, our first view of the black-bellied hamster, our first sight of the camel and dromedary, with a monkey on his neck, and our first bear, were seen in this way. Boys and girls in those days seldom saw menageries. A muzzled bear on its hind legs in Nicolson Street, or at the Sciennes, was an exotic sight seldom witnessed, and not easily forgotten. The last we saw was in Bernard Street, Leith, in 1869. That very day, the police were hunting for Bruin and its leaders all over Edinburgh. Bears are now debarred from parading our streets.
An Austrian General and a Bear.[30]
Mr Paget was told an excellent story of a bear hunt, which took place in the mountains of Transylvania, and in the presence of the gentleman who told him the story.
"General V——, the Austrian commander of the forces in this district, had come to Cronstadt to inspect the troops, and had been invited by our friend, in compliment to his rank, to join him in a bear hunt. Now, the general, though more accustomed to drilling than hunting, accepted the invitation, and appeared in due time in a cocked hat and long gray greatcoat, the uniform of an Austrian general. When they had taken up their places, the general, with half a dozen rifles arrayed before him, paid such devoted attention to a bottle of spirits he had brought with him, that he quite forgot the object of his coming. At last, however, a huge bear burst suddenly from the cover of the pine forest, directly in front of him. At that moment the bottle was raised so high that it quite obscured the general's vision, and he did not perceive the intruder till he was close upon him. Down went the bottle, up jumped the astonished soldier, and, forgetful of his guns, off he started, with the bear clutching at the tails of his greatcoat as he ran away. What strange confusion of ideas was muddling the general's intellect at the moment it is difficult to say, but I suspect he had some notion that the attack was an act of insubordination on the part of Bruin, for he called out most lustily, as he ran along, 'Back, rascal! back! I am a general!' Luckily, a poor Wallack peasant had more respect for the epaulettes than the bear, and, throwing himself in the way, with nothing but a spear for his defence, he kept the enemy at bay till our friend and the jägers came up, and finished the contest with their rifles."
Byron's Bear at Cambridge.
When at Trinity College, Cambridge, Lord Byron had a strange pet. He "brought up a bear for a degree." He said to Captain Medwyn,[31] "I had a great hatred of college rules, and contempt for academical honours. How many of their wranglers have ever distinguished themselves in the world? There was, by the by, rather a witty satire founded on my bear. A friend of Shelley's made an ourang-outang (Oran Hanton, Esq.) the hero of a novel ('Melincourt'), had him created a baronet, and returned for the borough of One Vote."
Charles Dickens on Bears' Grease and its Producers.
Any one who has been long resident in London, or who has passed through Fenchurch Street, or Everett Street, Russell Square, must have been struck with the way in which "bears' grease" is or used to be advertised in these localities. Dickens makes Mr Samuel Weller tell of an enthusiastic tradesman of this description.[32]