As Dogs licked the wounds of Lazarus, while Dives despised his poverty and refused him aid; so do we always find demonstrations of canine fidelity the greatest solace under temporary affliction, while the importunities of human hypocrites often add vexation to the weight of sorrow. History is full of examples of the benefits which dogs have conferred on men and of the injuries which mankind have inflicted on dogs. We need only read of the account left us of the dogs of Corinth, of the dogs of St. Bernard and the numerous stories of canine attachment and sagacity recorded in that memorable work the Histoire des Chiens celebres, and in Taylor's Anecdotes of Dogs, to be convinced of the importance of the blessing which the companionship of this faithful animal has afforded to our species. In all the histories of the extraordinary and unshaken attachment of dogs to their masters, from the faint records left us of the companion of Tobit down to the affecting story of the little cur of Brussels Park lately deceased, who lost his master in the revolution, for whom the government ordered a kennel close to the place where his master fell: in all these histories I say we cannot fail to notice the real existence of qualities in the animal which are scarcely more than feigned in the man. Conversely, I may say that there is scarcely a good quality affected by man, for which canine history does not furnish an archetype in examples of the solid and unpretending virtues of the dog. Unfortunately, the history of man and that of the dog afford a comparison so strikingly in favour of the latter, that we blush to own the disparagement, although we may reap benefit from the humiliation. And it is a remarkable circumstance, that I scarcely ever see or hear of an instance of human brutality towards this faithful and confiding animal for which we cannot find an example in the records of human ingratitude. I lately purchased a very curious mongrel between a Russian Pointer and a Griffon who had belonged to a blacksmith whose heart was probably as hard as his anvil. For I found this dog, whom I have elsewhere spoken of by the curious Sclavonic names of Loski Poscke Cerberus Paddelbohx Murgz, one of the most faithful of ihis kind, and, though snappish from bad health, he manifested a peculiar sense of property, and a faithfulness in guarding my effects which is rarely possessed even by dogs. And yet I learn with dismay, that lie was twice on the point of death from distemper, and was in each case carried out carelessly to die on a dunghill by his master; a circumstance which, while it reminds me of the fate of the faithful Argus, makes me largely participate in tbe indignation of Ulysses. Nor can I, when reflecting on this and similar ads, refuse my assent to every word of Byron's beautiful epitaph on his Newfoundland dog Boatswain, which I believe still remains inscribed on his tomb at Newslead Abbey.
The lines on his dog by Scott, also a great admirer of this animal, are to me tame after these, and so are the verses of Dellille, in his Trois Regnes, already well known and appreciated. The satyre contained in Burns inimitable poem of the Twa Dogs, should be read by every body, as it relates more to men than to this animal: and perhaps there is, in the whole of ancient or modern literature, nothing more to the point than the verses above alluded to.
It is indeed true and cannot be too often reapeted that, in taking a retrospect of the history of man from the remotest times, the collateral history of the dog, casts thereon a melancholy shadow, which deadens its lustre and shows us the ingratitude and vicious selfishness of our species in their worst and truest point of view. The dog constant to his master exhibits from first to last a gratifying example of unshaken fidelity: the master, too generally faithless to the dog from the moment when his utility ceases, presents a disgusting picture of base cupidity and ingratitude! Like the black slave whom the white Christian scourges at his work while he insults him with the title of a brother; the dog, bearing the false name of a friend, is treated by his master as if he were his worst enemy: he is hunted, beaten, harnessed to carts and made to do every sort of work; and undergoes a larger share of oppression than falls to the lot of other animals: and, when his services are over, he is either left, like the old servants of tenderhearted gentility, to shift for himself and gain a miserable subsistence on a muckheap in the street, or is drowned, like the superfluous children of the Chinese, by being unceremoniously flung into a river, and all this, too, after the most eminently useful and acknowledged services. Man, as general oppressor, seems to taint every thing which he touches, depraved in his own appetites and suffering from a thousand moral and physical ills, which his perverted passions have entailed on him, he seems capable of transferring, by domestication, many of his disorders to the brute creation; and thus the tame dog and the horse have engendered various distempers unknown to the wild specimens.
I shall close this eulogy with the following extract from the recorded lives of some favorite dogs celebrated for peculiar sagacity, and with such suitable reflections as occurred to my mind at the time.
At Schaerbeek, near Bruxelles, at a quarter before eleven o'clock on the morning of Saturday the 23d June, 1838, died Puppy Frescater Shargs, my favourite dog and best friend, out of pious regard to whose memory, I have drawn up the following account:
My dear old Shargs was one of those intelligent dogs which in England and Germany are called "poodles," and by the French "chiens canards." He was of a middling size, with long curling hair of a shining and beautiful white colour, excepting a few hairs in his tail and those about his left eye and ear, which were of a fine chocolate brown: his eyes were large, and dark hazel, and had a sweet mild and beautiful expression beaming with the benovelence which reigned in his heart, and expressive in the highest degree of all that intellect which distinguishes dogs in general, but which, perhaps, marks in particular the race to which he belonged. I never allowed him to be shorn, as many poodles are, nor to be taught any tricks imitative of human actions, believing that no dog was ever rendered more amiable by a forced assimilation to his oppressor, man, whose grimaces are all tainted with the dye of hypocrisy, and whose actions, in spite of the ridiculous mask which the world forces him to wear, are expressive of the deep selfishness which reigns over his heart. I never even liked him to sit up and beg; knowing that a man on his knees is too often a picture of cowardice in a posture of degradation, or of avarice in an attitude of servility. Nor would I suffer the cruel practice of clipping his ears and tail to deform his shape; scorning the arrogance of those who presume to dispute with the Creator about beauty, and recollecting the forcible description of Rousseau, where he designates man as an animal who, among his monstrous aggressions against the laws of Nature, whom he is for ever deforming, begins that unjust dominion over the weak parts of the creation which brute force and perverted intelligence alone confer, by mutilating his dog, his horse and his slave.
It was my object to bring up Puppy with as much of pure nature about him as was practicable under the influence of a kind domestic education, and habitual intercouse with myself and family, of which he became one, in the full enjoyment of a community of interests. With these preliminaries I shall proceed to give some account of his history.
I purchased Shargs, when a puppy of a few months old, of a boy who sold dogs in the street near to St. Clement's, in the Strand, in London, on Thursday the 17th of September, 1829, and brought him at first to my uncle's seat at Hale End, Walthamstow, and the next day carried him down in the Coggeshall coach to Boreham, where I had a house; here he grew up, and lived a recluse life for nearly four years, exhibiting the most extraordinary instance of intelligence, as well as of attachment to me. He seemed to know and to notice every thing that went on in the house, of which he was the constant guardian, and it is remarkable that during this period he never went beyond the garden and fields which belonged to it, having as perfect a knowledge of the boundaries as any Scottish shepherd's dog could have of his master's sheep walks. I wished very much that he should have accompanied me in an aerial voyage which I made on Saturday the 30th of April, 1831, as I ascended from a garden very near my own house; but my wife, fearing some accident might happen to him, and the consideration that not being interested in the philosophical experiment he ought not to be forced into the dangerous enterprize, this intention was abandoned.
In 1833 his habits were totally changed, when, instead of being always at home, he was always abroad, for in July of that year I left home with my family on an extensive tour of many years' continuance in the South of Europe, in which I was accompanied by Shargs; and so constant and faithful an attendant was he on me in all my movements that, with the sole exception of a few days in February, 1834, and of a week in 1838, he never slept out of the bedchamber from our first leaving Boreham July 15th, 1833, to the day of his lamented departure from this Valle di Lagrime June 23d, 1838. During this long tour, he arose every morning about daydreak, and accompanied me in long excursions on foot before breakfast; became familiar with my habits of botanizing and pursuing natural history; and showed the greatest sagacity in acquiring a knowledge of times and seasons, being thereof a most punctual observer. When walking, for instance, in the Pincii Gardens at Rome, in the summer of 1834, he would regularly prepare for returning home to breakfast, at the sound of the great bell at the Monte Citore, which rang about eight o'clock, and could distinguish it from the numerous bells which are heard all the morning from the four hundred steeples of the world's capital. In warm weather, on going out first in the morning, he went, at a certain hour, to a fountain near Monte di Trinita, shaded by the dark green ilex, to be washed, would then join three or four dogs, belonging to the Marquis Boscha, who used to walk with us, and amused himself for hours; but never failed to be ready, at the corner of the garden, to go to the Piazza di Spagna to breakfast at eight o'clock; for he had all his meals with us, and ate as we did, taking wine, fruit, tea, and every thing that came in his way; but he was most of all fond of his coffee after dinner, which he never missed, and after it, he laid down while I smoked my pipe, and then regularly took his siesta with me on the sofa. If he walked out in the public streets later in the day, he used to come first and beg to have his string put on to his collar, that he might be led in it, as he was terribly afraid of getting lost in the public thoroughfares. He was the best guard at night I ever knew, and with him on the foot of the bed, I was not afraid of being surprised in the night even in inhospitable and dangerous countries through which we sometimes travelled. He was also an excellent swimmer. Nothing seemed to escape his notice which passed in the inns in which we slept; and I knew precisely by his particular sort of bark or growl, whether a rat, a friend, or a stranger approached my bed. During our voyages I was accompanied by my wife, my daughter and another lady, and I could frequently tell which of them might be entering any room in which I was reposing with Shargs after dinner, by the manner he wagged his tail and by the modulation of his voice. In this respect, of a graduated preference shown to different members of my family, he resembled Busy, a sagacious terrier, belonging to my father, who died in 1809, and whose organology, like lhat of Shargs, corresponded exactly to the character of intelligence, fidelity and attachment, qualities which provoked a return of love and esteem, and which contributed, perhaps, to their somewhat premature death; for the kindness of the family being carried to excess in the luxury with which they were fed, brought on the physical evil of repletion.
It may easily be imagined that, participating in the delicacies of the table with the rest of the family, Shargs would become somewhat unhealthy. While pursuing the active life of a traveller, this repletion was carried of by movement; but after we had ceased to roam, and had taken a fixed residence at Schaerbeek in May, 1837, he began to show signs of weakness. He walked with me, certainly, every morning in the fields, accompanied by Moustache, another poodle and a great and favourite friend,and he likewise amused himself in the garden: but the severe winter which followed, depriving him of his quantum of exercise, favoured, evidently, some epidemic influence; his ears became inflamed: in March he began to go lame of the left forefoot; a slow and gradual paralysis of all his limbs accompanied by a painful rheumatism of the neck followed, and he was almost deprived of the power of motion before the end of May: still he continued to eat well, as he lay on his cushions beside our dinner table; indeed, I think he ate too much. I was forced to leave him, to visit London for a week, and, on my return, June 18th, I found him getting worse. He knew me, however, and wagged his tail on hearing my voice; but his mind evidently sympathized with the affection of the spinal column, and though he retained his docility and gentle manners to the last, it was with greatly diminished sensibility. A very difficult respiration came on, he lost his relish for food, and got weaker and weaker: my wife and another person sat up with him every night on a sofa close by the bed, and I had frequently to get up, and assist him before morning. At length, about a quarter before eleven on the morning of Saturday the 23d of June, 1838, I noticed a sudden and very beautiful green colour in his eyes, which I have not been able to account for; he then moved once more his hitherto paralysed legs and his tail, laid his head on his fore paws, and died so gently and easily
that the moment of his dissolution could hardly be ascertained. Indeed, the precise moment of the separation of soul and body, as it is called, like the precise instant of primary animation in ovario, cannot be well ascertained; like all other things in nature, life and death are shaded off by nuances so fine, and glide into and out of one another by such imperceptible degrees, that their juncture evades the imperfect power of human sense, and is lost among the mysteries of existence. Life and death are strange things: their points of juncture afford an instructive lesson, and teach us, beyond everything else, to appreciate the poverty of our philosophy, and the vanity of human things! In viewing death we reflect that to this we must all come, and then our anxious solicitudes vanish from our minds. In meditating on birth, we remember that we were once a mere point of incipient intelligence, with scarcely one idea or sensation! We grew, perceived, acquired knowledge of external nature, became great in our own estimation pursued science, swept the sky with telescopes, and penetrated the earth in its minutest particles with lenses, and we fouud all was life; in every atom, through infinite space, existing without any known beginning or end, and we referred our own perceptions to the universe, and, by a more refined metaphysical philosophy, ascribed the latter to its author; and thought ourselves, and the mundane system which we inhabit, as nothing! We boast of our knowledge, but we know nothing of its first principles, and we see, in the prospect of death, the end of all those sensations of which our present knowledge is composed. The universe is large and beautiful, but, while we are contemplating it, a tile may fall on the temporal bone, or a seed may by chance descend into the trachea, and then, as far as human philosophy goes, the whole universe may vanish in a moment, and become to us as though it had never been; a thought which, when combined with the reflection we are ignorant of the first principles of every science and of the destiny of all things, leaves us the consolation of Pliny: solum certum nihil esse certi, et homine nihil miserius aut superbius.
We physiologists are accustomed to view death under all its forms, but it is only when much interested in the dying party that dissolution makes a strong impression, or leads to important meditations. In watching the gradual death of several particular friends, both men and animals, one cannot but reflect, how very similar is the death of a human being to that of other animals. How is it possible, therefore, for persons, habituated to exercise from infancy the sure mental powers of induction and analogy, to refer the one to a separation of soul and body, and the other to a simple process of corporeal dissolution. In every department of nature similar effects can be traced to similar causes; and, if something called sensitive life, added to organic mechanism, can produce in the animal strong sentiments of love and fidelity guided by a high intelligence, I ask is it not stupid pride and self love alone that must have induced vain man to refer the mental phenomena of his own species to an infinitely superior principle; to arrogate to himself a distinctive soul, to appropriate to himself an exclusive paradise? Born of flesh and blood, like other animals, and, like them, at first only a living speck in the womb of his mother, supported, like them by material nutriment, developed, like them, by degrees, in proportion to the increase of bodily organs; subject, like them, to a variety of accidents and diseases; and perishing, just as they do, with the gradual decay of his material fabric, man exhibits no natural claims to a distinctive sort of existence. Is it in the exercise of certain higher functions of mind, possessed by a few individuals, and in being the prey of baser and more disgusting passions, which degrade the many, that man can vainly found an eternal distinction between himself and other brutes? If so, let it be remembered that individual defects have filled up the pretended gap between man and beast, and that the cretin and the idiot are below the horse and the elephant, in the scale of intelligence, as much as the hypocrite and the sensualist are below the dog in moral worth! Moreover, phrenology has explained all this, and has shown the exact relation which exists between the organs and faculties, both of men and other animals, in all their varieties and character, and in all their stages of development. We feel, however, a sort of consciousness of personal identity of mind: we feel that the percipient principle within is not identical with the things perceived without us, and that what we call ourselves or minds may be united hereafter to other organizations, and exist under other conditions, without any loss of identity! By ascribing to other persons, who look outwardly like ourselves, a similar mental principle, we get an idea of a world of spirits as well as of bodies; and this is highly consoling, because it is in conformity with those future hopes that all religions have professed to uphold. But I ask whether, by admitting that animals can
exist and perform sentimental and intellectual functions, without possessing such a spiritual nature, we do not weaken the arguments in favour of our own souls? Must not the admission that something less than a spiritual and indissoluble nature, added to organization, is sufficient for the performance of intellectual functions in general, exclude the necessity of referring our own intellect in particular to such an imperishable and spiritual principle? Willing, therefore, by every means to foster, rather than to weaken the cherished impressions of infancy, I am induced to regard in a favourable light the holy doctrine of Pythagoras and the Indian school, which ascribes to every living creature an eternal existence, and which represents the various evils of sublunary life, whether in regard to men or animals, as mere stages in the preparatory progress of creatures towards the perfections of their creator; a doctrine which, while it militates against no system of religion and of retributive justice, enlarges our minds and enables us to extend our views of divine benevolence, not only to every creeping thing upon the earth, but to the probable inhabitants of all the stars which constitute the myriads of polymorphous nebulae in the remotest regions of the heavens, and which, by teaching us to resolve every phenomenon into the goodness of the creator, exerted in the infinite multiplication of eternal happiness, makes us forget particular evils, in the prospect of a general good, and tends to establish in our minds the fundamental principles of Faith, Hope and Charity. We ought to reflect, too, that our organization and, consequently, our means of knowledge are very limited, and may, perhaps, convey but a very imperfect knowledge of external objects and their various relations,and that the addition of even one more sense, might open to our view many hidden truths, and, by its combinations, reconcile us to so many apparent contradictions.
At the conclusion of these reflections we may be asked, To what do they lead? I reply that they tend to make us set a value on our fleeting hours, and induce us to apply ourselves to that only which is practically useful as a means of promoting good; and, above all, not to neglect the enjoyment of the present, in the uncertain pursuit of the future, which the highest sagacity cannot enable us to foresee.
A thousand sects of Jews, Christians, Mahometans, Brachmans and Pagans are wasting their time with their systems, and mutually accusing each other of heresy and blasphemy; each claiming a sole right to heaven on the grounds of an intolerant religion. The true philosopher laughs at their presumption, and, grateful for the perception of the magnificent universe, of which he forms a part in common with other animals, he gives charitable employment to his hours; and makes his own happiness to consist in promoting theirs, and, when annoyed with the impertinent pretensions of theorists, and soothsayers he replies:
Dum loquimiir fugerit invida
Aetas. Carpe diem. quam minimum
Credula postero.
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