The King Charles Spaniel 721 



English spaniel. His description of spaniels is as follows and as will be 

 seen it applied to all sizes of Continental spaniels: 



"The head of this dog is small and round, the ears are large and pen- 

 dant, the legs, fine, thin and short, the body thin and the tail raised. Their 

 coat is smooth and of various lengths on different parts of the body, being 

 very long on the ears, under the neck, behind the thighs, at the back of all 

 four legs and on the tail. It is shorter on the other parts of the body. Most 

 of the spaniels are white, the most beautiful have the head of another colour, 

 such as brown, or black and are marked with white on the muzzle and the 

 centre of forehead. The black and white spaniels have usually tan coloured 

 spots over the eyes. There are large and small spaniels.'* 



He then proceeds to specify what the English spaniels were like. "There 

 are some black spaniels which are also called gredins, and which are called 

 English spaniels, because they originate in that country. The greatest 

 difference between these dogs and the French spaniels is in the shorter coat 

 on the ears, legs and tails of the gredins. There are small, and also medium 

 sized spaniels in comparison with the larger ones. They give the name of 

 Pyrame to Gredins that are "fire-marked" i. e. with favm (tan), above the 

 eyes, on the muzzle, on the throat and on the legs." 



Through an error in following a number of English writers we were led 

 to say in a previous chapter that Buffon named the Blenheim or Marlborough 

 spaniel "pyrame," but there is no mistake possible in this quotation from 

 his Natural History. Singular to say the old publishing firm of Longman 

 in a natural history they got out in 1810 used quite a number of the Buffon 

 illustrations of dogs but altered the small spaniels by adding a black dog 

 to the pyrame and called that the King Charles spaniel. 



That these "fire-marked" spaniels could not have been at all popular or 

 common is proved by their absence from paintings and portraits in which 

 dogs are introduced. Sir Joshua Reynolds often put a spaniel in his 

 portraits of ladies, but we have not seen a black and tan in any of them. 



The first reference to the black and tan as being the King Charles breed, 

 that we have found, is in Rev. Mr. Symons, "Treatise on Field Diversions," 

 1776, in which he says "The cocking or gun spaniel, of true perfect breed, 

 is of one general or whole colour; either black or black-tan, commonly 

 called King Charles's breed; or red, in different shades, paler or deeper; 

 such as in horses we would call a blood, or a bright bay. Coat loose and 

 soft, but not waven. Back broad and short. Legs short, with breeches 



