48 The Poets Beasts. 



under heaven ; and the smell of him is so sweet and whole- 

 some that the very savour cures all infirmities. He is 

 the physician of all animals that follow him, and has one 

 fair bone, broad and thin, in which, when slain, are contained 

 the whole virtues of the animal. It can never be broken 

 nor consumed by any of the elements : yet it is so light 

 that a feather will poise it, and it can receive a fine 

 polish." 



In metaphor these twin animals are very unfruitful in the 

 poets' hands. As being beautiful but of faulty character, 

 they supply the fabulist with a satire — in Dryden on the 

 English Church, in Gay on a vain beauty, in Spenser a 

 cruel one, in Moore a dissolute one. And as being fierce, 

 a simile for impetuous soldiery, as "the sword of the 

 Moslem," and the British attack. 



JAGUAR, PUMA, CHEETAH, OUNCE. 



Tw'O or three poets mention the " Jaguar " and the " fell 

 Puma that feeds on the colt and the steer," and once by 

 inference (in Somerville) the cheetah is indicated. Nor 

 in the case of the last-named is obscurity altogether unjusti- 

 fiable, for, except as part of the hunting equipage of princes, 

 Asiatic and African, or — in the case, for instance, of Semend- 

 manik, the favourite of Akhbar — as royal pets, the cheetah 

 is an inconspicuous animal in its own countries. 



At the same time it should not be forgotten that the 

 cheetah is the real " pard " of the ancients, and therefore 

 the animal that the poets really mean, though they do not 

 know it, when they refer to " leopards " of antiquity. 



But, in the case of the other two furred princes, the truly 

 royal jaguar, and the very picturesque and sometimes very 

 ferocious puma — or cougar,^ mountain lion, or panther of 

 Western America — such neglect is perhaps more noteworthy. 



' " Cougar's deadly spring." — Mrs ILmans. 



