IV. 



SOME BEASTS OF REPROACH. 



Poets use wild beasts chiefly as tenns of reproach. They 

 seem to see no moral beauty, and recognise little good, in 

 them. Being Wild beasts, they are bestial, and being bestial, 

 they are types of corresponding deformines in human nature. 

 For poets do not, as a class, seem to have the generosity 

 that belongs to the true lover of Nature, to admire the wild- 

 beastiness of wild beasts, and to contemplate them in the 

 orderly scheme of creation, outside the hackneyed phases 

 of popular ignorance, or beyond the sphere of man's own 

 common needs. 



Servile animals they overload with flattery. The inde- 

 pendent wild beast they traduce. Sheep are virtuous 

 Christians : tigers are the infamous heathen. 



A certain number of animals contemplated by the poets 

 as being harmless — the camel, giraffe, elephant, hippopo- 

 tamus, kangaroo, opossum, beaver, and bison — are used, of 

 course, as similes of patience, stateliness, sagacity, bulk, 

 agility, timidity, vigilance, and strength respectively — and 

 among the British fauna the deer, hare, rabbit, squirrel, and 

 dormouse are symbols of admirable docility, amiable weak- 

 ness, cheerfulness, and dozy contentment. Yet even each 

 of these receives, in turn, more or less cynical treatment at 

 times, while all of them are mentioned so casually, or con- 

 templated from a standpoint of such lofty condescension, 



