Heads And Tales Part 11

SYDNEY SMITH DISLIKES DOGS.

AN INGENIOUS WAY OF GETTING RID OF THEM.

Lady Holland tells us[96] that her father, the witty canon of St Paul's, disliked dogs. "During one of his visits to London, at a dinner at Spencer House, the conversation turned upon dogs. 'Oh,' said my father, 'one of the greatest difficulties I have had with my parishioners has been on the subject of dogs.'--'How so?' said Lord Spencer.--'Why, when I first went down into Yorkshire, there had not been a resident clergyman in my parish for a hundred and fifty years. Each farmer kept a huge mastiff dog ranging at large, and ready to make his morning meal on clergy or laity, as best suited his particular taste. I never could approach a cottage in pursuit of my calling but I rushed into the jaws of one of these s.h.a.ggy monsters. I scolded, preached, and prayed without avail; so I determined to try what fear for their pockets might do.

Forthwith appeared in the county papers a minute account of the trial of a farmer, at the Northampton Sessions, for keeping dogs unconfined; where said farmer was not only fined five pounds and reprimanded by the magistrates, but sentenced to three months' imprisonment. The effect was wonderful, and the reign of Cerberus ceased in the land.'--'That accounts,' said Lord Spencer, 'for what has puzzled me and Althorp for many years. We never failed to attend the sessions at Northampton, and we never could find out how we had missed this remarkable dog case.'"

SYDNEY SMITH ON DOGS.[97]

"No, I don't like dogs; I always expect them to go mad. A lady asked me once for a motto for her dog Spot. I proposed, 'Out, d.a.m.ned Spot!' But she did not think it sentimental enough. You remember the story of the French marquise, who, when her pet lap-dog bit a piece out of her footman's leg, exclaimed, 'Ah, poor little beast! I hope it won't make him sick.' I called one day on Mrs ----, and her lap-dog flew at my leg and bit it. After pitying her dog, like the French marquise, she did all she could to comfort me by a.s.suring me the dog was a Dissenter, and hated the Church, and was brought up in a Tory family. But whether the bite came from madness or Dissent, I knew myself too well to neglect it, and went on the instant to a surgeon, and had it cut out, making a mem.

on the way to enter that house no more."

SYDNEY SMITH'S "NEWFOUNDLAND DOG THAT BREAKFASTED ON PARISH BOYS."

The Rev. Sydney Smith used to be much amused when he observed the utter want of perception of a joke in some minds. One instance we may cite from his "Memoirs:"[98] "Miss ----, the other day, walking round the grounds at Combe Florey, exclaimed, 'Oh, why do you chain up that fine Newfoundland dog, Mr Smith?'--'Because it has a pa.s.sion for breakfasting on parish boys.'--'Parish boys!' she exclaimed; 'does he really eat boys, Mr Smith?'--'Yes, he devours them, b.u.t.tons and all.' Her face of horror made me die of laughing."

SOUTHEY ON DOGS.

Southey was likewise not a little attached to the memory at least of dogs, as may be inferred by the following pa.s.sage in a letter to Mr Bedford, Jan. 27, 1823. Snivel was a dog belonging to Mr B. in early days. "We had an adventure this morning, which, if poor Snivel had been living, would have set up her bristles in great style. A foumart was caught in the back kitchen; you may perhaps know it better by the name of polecat. It is the first I ever saw or smelt; and certainly it was in high odour. Poor Snivel! I still have the hairs which we cut from her tail thirty years ago; and if it were the fashion for men to wear lockets, in a locket they should be worn, for I never had a greater respect for any creature upon four legs than for poor Sni. See how naturally men fall into relic worship; when I have preserved the memorials of that momentary whim so many years, and through so many removals."[99]

DOG, A GOOD JUDGE OF ELOCUTION.

When Dr Leifchild, of Craven Chapel, London, was a student at Hoxton Academy, there was a good lecturer on elocution there of the name of True. In the Memoir, published in 1863, are some pleasing reminiscences by Dr Leifchild of this excellent teacher, who seems to have taken great pains with the students, and to have awakened in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s a desire to become proficients in the art of speaking. The doctor himself was an admirable example of the proficiency thus attained under good Mr True.

He records[100] a ludicrous circ.u.mstance which occurred one day. "In reciting Satan's address to the evil spirits from 'Paradise Lost,' a stout student was enjoined to p.r.o.nounce the three words, 'Princes, potentates, warriors,' in successively louder tones, and to speak out boldly. He hardly needed this advice, for the first word came out like distant thunder, the second like approaching thunder, and the third like a terribly near and loud clap. At this last the large housedog, Pompey, who had been asleep under the teacher's chair, started up and jumped out of the window into the garden. 'The dog is a good judge, sir,' mildly remarked Mr True."

COWPER'S DOG BEAU AND THE WATER-LILY.

ILl.u.s.tRATED BY THE STORY OF AS INTELLIGENT A DOG.

In _Blackwood's Magazine_ for 1818 there is an address, in blank verse, by Mr Patrick Fraser Tytler, "To my Dog." Mr Tytler's brother-in-law, Mr Hog,[101] recorded the fact on which this address was founded in his diary at the time. "Peter tells a delightful anecdote of Cossack, an Isle of Skye terrier, which belonged originally to his brother at Aldourie. It was amazingly fond of his children, one of which, having fallen on the gravel and hurt itself, began to cry out. Cossack tried in vain to comfort it by leaping upon it and licking its face. Finding all his efforts to pacify the child fruitless, he ran off to a mountain-ash tree, and leaping up, pulled a branch of red _rowan_ berries and carried it in his mouth to the child."

HORACE WALPOLE'S PET DOG ROSETTE.

Horace Walpole, writing to Lord Nuneham in November 1773,[102]

says:--"The rest of my time has been employed in nursing Rosette--alas!

to no purpose. After suffering dreadfully for a fortnight from the time she was seized at Nuneham, she has only languished till about ten days ago. As I have nothing to fill my letter, I will send you her epitaph; it has no merit, for it is an imitation, but in coming from the heart if ever epitaph did, and therefore your dogmanity will not dislike it--

'Sweetest roses of the year, Strew around my Rose's bier, Calmly may the dust repose Of my pretty, faithful Rose!

And if yon cloud-topp'd hill[103] behind This frame dissolved, this breath resign'd, Some happier isle, some humbler heaven, Be to my trembling wishes given; Admitted to that equal sky, May sweet Rose bear me company!'"

ARRIVAL OF TONTON, A PET DOG, TO WALPOLE.--TONTON DOES NOT UNDERSTAND ENGLISH.

Horace Walpole, in May 1781,[104] had announced Tonton's arrival to his correspondent, the Hon. H. S. Conway. He says:--"I brought him this morning to take possession of his new villa, but his inauguration has not been at all pacific. As he has already found out that he may be as despotic as at St Joseph's, he began with exiling my beautiful little cat, upon which, however, we shall not quite agree. He then flew at one of my dogs, who returned it by biting his foot till it bled, but was severely beaten for it. I immediately rung for Margaret (his housekeeper) to dress his foot; but in the midst of my tribulation could not keep my countenance, for she cried, 'Poor little thing; he does not understand my language!' I hope she will not recollect, too, that he is a Papist!" In a postscript he tells the general that Tonton "is a cavalier, and a little of the _mousquetaire_ still; but if I do not correct his vivacities, at least I shall not encourage them, like my dear old friend."

In a letter of about the same date to Mason the poet, he again alludes to his fondness of Tonton, but adds--"I have no occasion to brag of my dogmanity."[105]

Horace Walpole, in 1774, thus refers to Margaret, in a letter to Lady Ossory:--"Who is to have the care of the dear mouse in your absence? I wish I could spare Margaret, who loves all creatures so well that she would have been happy in the ark, and sorry when the deluge ceased; unless people had come to see Noah's old house, which she would have liked still better than cramming his menagerie."[106] A sly allusion to the numerous fees Margaret got from visitors. Horace, in another of his letters, alludes to this, and, in a joke, proposes to marry Margaret to enrich himself.

HORACE WALPOLE.--DEATH OF HIS DOG TONTON.

Horace Walpole, writing to the Countess of Ossory, Feb. 24, 1789,[107]

says:--"I delayed telling you that Tonton is dead, and that I comfort myself. He was grown stone deaf, and very nearly equally blind, and so weak that the two last days he could not walk up-stairs. Happily he had not suffered, and died close by my side without a pang or a groan. I have had the satisfaction, for my dear old friend's sake and his own, of having nursed him up, by constant attention, to the age of sixteen, yet always afraid of his surviving me, as it was scarcely possible he could meet a third person who would study his happiness equally. I sent him to Strawberry, and went thither on Sunday to see him buried behind the chapel near Rosette. I shall miss him greatly, and must not have another dog; I am too old, and should only breed it up to be unhappy when I am gone. My resource is in two marble kittens that Mrs Damer has given me, of her own work, and which are so much alive that I talk to them, as I did to poor Tonton! If this is being superannuated, no matter; when dotage can amuse itself it ceases to be an evil. I fear my marble playfellows are better adapted to me, than I am to being your ladyship's correspondent." Poor Tonton was left to Walpole by "poor dear Madame de Deffand." In a letter to the Rev. Mr Cole, in 1781, he announces its arrival, and how "she made me promise to take care of it the last time I saw her. That I will most religiously, and make it as happy as is possible."[108]

ARCHBISHOP WHATELY AND HIS DOGS.

"In these rambles he was generally attended by three uncompromising-looking dogs, the heads of which, if it were possible to draw them together in shamrock form, would forcibly suggest Cerberus.

Richard Whately found, or thought he found, in the society of these dogs far brighter intelligence, and infinitely more fidelity, than in many of the Oxford men, who had been fulsomely praised for both.

"In devotion to his dogs, Dr Whately continued true to the end of his life, and during the winter season might be daily seen in St Stephen's Green, Dublin, playing at 'tig' or 'hide and seek' with his canine attendants. Sometimes the old archbishop might be seen clambering up a tree, secreting his handkerchief or pocket-knife in some cunning nook, then resuming his walk, and, after a while, suddenly affecting to have lost these articles, which the dogs never failed immediately to regain.

"That he was a close observer of the habits of dogs and other quadrupeds we have evidence in his able lecture on 'Animal Instinct.' Dr Whately, when referring to another subject, once said not irrelevantly, 'The power of duly appreciating _little_ things belongs to a great mind: a narrow-minded man has it not, for to him they are _great_ things.' Dr Whately was of opinion that some brutes were as capable of exercising reason as instinct. In his 'Lectures and Reviews' (p. 64) he tells of a dog which, being left on the bank of a river by his master, who had gone up the river in a boat, attempted to join him. He plunged into the water, but not making allowance for the strength of the stream, which carried him considerably below the boat, he could not beat up against it. He landed, and made allowance for the current of the river by leaping in at a place higher up. The combined action of the stream and his swimming carried him in an oblique direction, and he thus reached the boat. Dr Whately adopts the following conclusion--'It appears, then, that we can neither deny reason universally and altogether to brutes, nor instinct to man; but that each possesses a share of both, though in very different proportions.'"[109]

SIR DAVID WILKIE COULD NOT SEE A PUN.--"A DOG-ROSE."

The son and biographer of William Collins, the Royal Academician,[110]

quotes from a ma.n.u.script collection of anecdotes, written by that charming painter of country life and landscape, the following on Sir David Wilkie:--"Wilkie was not quick in perceiving a joke, although he was always anxious to do so, and to recollect humorous stories, of which he was exceedingly fond. As instances, I recollect once when we were staying at Mr Wells's, at Redleaf, one morning at breakfast a very small puppy was running about under the table. 'Dear me,' said a lady, 'how this creature teases me!' I took it up and put it into my breast-pocket.

Mr Wells said, 'That is a pretty nosegay.'--'Yes,' said I, 'it is a dog-rose.' Wilkie's attention, sitting opposite, was called to his friend's pun, but all in vain. He could not be persuaded to see anything in it. I recollect trying once to explain to him, with the same want of success, Hogarth's joke in putting the sign of the woman without a head ('The Good Woman') under the window from which the quarrelsome wife is throwing the dinner into the street."

ULYSSES AND HIS DOG.

Richard Payne Knight, in his "Inquiry into the Principles of Taste,"[111] when treating of the "sublime and pathetic," quotes the story of Ulysses and his dog, as follows:--"No Dutch painter ever exhibited an image less imposing, or less calculated to inspire awe and terror, or any other of Burke's symptoms or sources of the sublime (unless, indeed, it be a stink), than the celebrated dog of Ulysses lying upon a dunghill, covered with vermin and in the agonies of death; yet, when in such circ.u.mstances, on hearing the voice of his old master, who had been absent twenty years, he p.r.i.c.ks his ears, wags his tail, and expires, what heart is not at once melted, elevated, and expanded with all those glowing feelings which Longinus has so well described as the genuine effects of the true sublime? That master, too--the patient, crafty, and obdurate Ulysses, who encounters every danger and bears every calamity with a constancy unshaken, a spirit undepressed, and a temper unruffled--when he sees this faithful old servant perishing in want, misery, and neglect, yet still remembering his long-lost benefactor, and collecting the last effort of expiring nature to give a sign of joy and gratulation at his return, hides his face and wipes away the tear! This is true sublimity of character, which is always mixed with tenderness--mere sanguinary ferocity being terrible and odious, but never sublime. [Greek: Agathoi polydakrytoi andres]--_Men p.r.o.ne to tears are brave_, says the proverbial Greek hemistich; for courage, which does not arise from mere coa.r.s.eness of organisation, but from that sense of dignity and honour which const.i.tutes the generous pride of a high mind, is founded in sensibility."

FOOTNOTES:

[46] "The Olio," by the late Francis Grose, Esq., F.A.S., p. 203.

[47] "Dogs and their Ways;" ill.u.s.trated by numerous anecdotes, compiled from authentic sources, by the Rev. Charles Williams. 1863.

[48] It may interest the reader, who does not dive deep into literary curiosities, to refer to the original edition of Hayley's "Cowper" (4to, 1803, vol. i. p. 314), where the poet, in a letter to Samuel Rose, Esq., written at Weston, August 18, 1788, alludes to his having "composed a _spick_ and _span_ new piece called 'The Dog and the Water-lily;'" and in his next letter, September 11, he sent this piece to his excellent friend, the London barrister. Visitors to Olney and Weston, who have gone over the poet's walks, cannot but have their love for the gentle and afflicted Cowper most deeply _intensified_.--_See_ Miller's "First Impressions."

[49] This book, like Storer's other ill.u.s.trations of the scenes of the poems of Burns and Bloomfield, drawn immediately after the death of these poets, will become year by year more valuable.

[50] "Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh,"

edited by his son, Robert James Mackintosh, Esq., vol. i. p. 164.

[51] "Bawsn't," having a white stripe down the face.--_Glossary to Burns's Poems._

[52] See an extract farther on, in proof of this.