Bears and Wolves. 75 



and then with the mutton-herd himself— enrages the ordinary 

 poet. Nor, when this infamous appetite for butchers' meat 

 is indulged by a meal of lamb, are even the better poets able 

 to control their generous indignation — 



' ' The gaunt wolf crouches to spring out on the lamb, 

 And if hunger be on him, he spares not the dam," 



Worse than this is Colin's complaint — 



" They often devoured their owne sheepe. 



And often the shepheards that did hem keepe ; 

 This was the first source of shepheard' s sorrow.'" 



The last line is a delightful one. 



Savage, Akenside, Rogers, and others extend their tender- 

 ness from the lamb to its cousin the kid, but there is always, 

 curiously enough, a reservation of sympathy from the fact 

 that the kid was "straying." The lamb, on the other hand, 

 is generally where it should be, "bleating near its fleecy 

 dam ; " and the unprincipled conduct of the wolf takes 

 therefore a deeper dye from the outrage on the ewe's feel- 

 ings which accompanies that on the lamb's, while if the 

 victim be carried out of a sheepfold there is the crime 

 of housebreaking superadded. Supreme, however, in this 

 particular class of offence was that wolf who married a lamb, 

 and then ate her up after they had been only wedded 

 a week. 



But sometimes it arrives that the shepherds get the better 

 of the wolf, as in Chatterton's " Battle of Hastings " — 



" As when the shipster in his shadie bower 

 Hears doublying echoe wind the wolfin's rore, 

 That neare hys flocke is watchynge for a praie, 

 With trustie talbots to the battel flies, 

 And yell of men and dogs and wolfins tear the skies." 



Or in " The Wanderer "— 



