Bears and Wolves. 79 



The generous lion stands in softened gaze, 



Here bleeds, a hapless undistinguish'd prey. 



But if, appris'd of the severe attack. 



The country be shut up, lured by the scent. 



On churchyards drear (inhuman to relate ! ) 



The disappointed prowlers fall, and dig 



The shrouded body from the grave ; o'er which, 



Mix'd with foul shades and frightened ghosts, they howl." 



Each enormity in Thomson's catalogue finds abundant 

 individual condemnation in the poets. Thus Leyden — 



" The prowling wolves that round the hamlet swarm 

 Tear the young babe from the frail mother's arm ; 

 Full gorged, the monster, in the desert bred, 

 Howls, long and dreary, o'er the unburied dead." 



Chaucer's wolf; " with eyen red and of a man he ete ; " 

 Dodd's gaunt wolf, that, " blood-happy, growling feeds on 

 the quivering heart" of the belated Switzer;^ Mackay's 

 score of wolves " rushing like ghouls on a corse new- 

 dead ;" Montgomery's " gorged wolves, howling in con- 

 vulsive slumber o'er their corses ; " and Webster's 



" But keep the wolf far hence, that's foe to men, 

 For with his nails he'll dig them up again. " 



How this ghoul attribute of the wolf gained currency it 

 is not easy to guess, for no work of natural history charges 

 the wolf with doing that for which it is by nature unfitted 

 to accomplish. A wolf might of course scratch up a corpse 

 that was only lightly covered with soil, but it has not got the 

 claws necessary for rifling any decent grave. 



The climax of horror is of course reached when, like 

 Wordsworth's, the wolf is a baby-eater — 



" Vexed by the darkness, from the piny gulf, 

 Ascending nearer, howls the famished wolf, 



^ The mountaineer, naturally, is more often the prey of poets' wolves 

 than other classes of solitary-lived men, shepherds alone excepted. 



