134 Modern Dogs. 



dog which hunted by scent ; even the bloodhound 

 was so called. The earliest appearance of the word 

 appears in the Arthurian legend of Garvaine and 

 the Green Knight (1340). " Braches bayed, there- 

 fore, and breme (loud) noise made." Markham 

 uses it as applied to a bitch, thus : '' When your 

 bratche is near whelping," &c. Caius does like- 

 wise. Shakespeare and other writers use the word 

 in varying senses ; Jameson, in his Scottish dic- 

 tionary, defining it as a hound which found and 

 pursued game by scent. However, it does not 

 matter much whether the " brach " was the original 

 beagle or not, but the latter came from under his 

 cloud about the time of good Queen Bess, who was 

 said to be the fortunate possessor of a pack of hounds 

 so small that they could be carried in a lady's 

 glove. Well, either the hounds must have been far 

 smaller than the least of our toy terriers of to-day 

 (which is extremely unlikely), or the glove of more 

 capacious dimensions than a "fives Dent and Ald- 

 croft " of the present time (which is extremely 

 improbable), or the story an exaggeration (which is 

 perhaps true). So there is only one conclusion to 

 be arrived at, that these so-called '^singing beagles" 

 of our virgin queen were somewhat of a myth, or 

 that one of them, and not the whole pack, could be 

 ensconced in "my lady's gauntlet." William III. 



