Bears a?id Wolves. 69 



would have been aware that bears are very generous, never 

 returning to harm a helpless or fallen adversary. "Women," 

 says Slender, " cannot abide them, they are very ill-favoured 

 rough things;" but there is an abundant dignity about 

 them nevertheless. They are among the seniors of the 

 quadrupeds in Nature, and in Art they brought no declen- 

 sion from eminence to such as bore them on their shields 

 — the greatest of monarchs, of earls, and of painters. 



WOLVES. 



" ' Well is knowne that,' sith the Saxon king, 

 ' Never was wolf seene, many nor some, 

 Nor in all Kent, nor in Christendom.'" 



But there was a time, as Keats says, " while yet our Eng- 

 land was a wolfish den," when our ancestors called January 

 " the wolf month," and prayed in their litanies for defence 

 against them when estates were held on wolf-head tenure ; 

 and many poets, Dryden, Somerville, Drayton, Addison 

 amongst them, gratefully allude to the purging of our isles 

 of these destructive pests. 



*' Cambria's proud kings (tho' with reluctance) paid 

 Their tributary wolves, head after head, 

 The full account, till the wood yields no more, 

 And all the rav'nous race extinct is lost" 



To the poets, therefore, with their allowable extensions 

 of horizon and chronology, the wolf is a British animal : 

 not in the way that the lion has become one, but on the 

 more practical basis of previous existence in the countr\'. 



" Full many a year his hateful head had been 

 In tribute paid, nor since in Cambria seen." 



So it comes, perhaps, more familiarly off their pens than 

 other animals. Its name, moreover, has become, almost 



