S6 The Poets Beasts. 



that the poets' sentiment towards them is hardly more than 

 one of acidulated toleration. 



Sheep, cattle, deer, and dogs, the domesticated animals 

 in fact, are favourites of the poets. For very few poets view 

 Nature except in its relations with man. It is the chief 

 charge against the wolf that it eats the mutton intended for 

 human beings; and if an owl frightens Chaw-bacon, it is, 

 therefore, an obscene and death-boding fowl. But sheep 

 and cows, horses and dogs and deer, being servile animals, 

 are flattered with the same exaggerated attentions as "the 

 meek birds of the dove-cot " that fill pigeon-pies, and the 

 bees that " yield their honey'd stores " for the poet's break- 

 fast. Yet even with these, their inordinate favourites, the 

 poets sometimes fall out. They are never tired of remind- 

 ing sheep that they are silly, abusing the bull for using his 

 horns against men, libelling dogs when of low degree, and 

 horses that are "jades." So that neither the "harmless" 

 animals nor the " domesticated " meet with complete 

 urbanity. 



But outside these two classes stand nearly all the Wild- 

 Beast world, and to them, the bravest and most beautiful 

 of Nature's ministers, the poets are all uncharitableness. 

 The lion is the one exception, but then the lion of poetry 

 is a magnificent creation of the poets, and not the creature 

 of Nature at all. For the rest, the lords of the forest and 

 plain, the peerage of jungle-duchies and desert-earldoms, 

 the marquisates of river-side and cafion — the tiger and 

 leopard, panther, puma and jaguar, ounce, ocelot and lynx, 

 cheetah, bear, wolf, rhinoceros — there is nothing but re- 

 proach. And for what reason? Only the most egotistical 

 and whimsical. Those that are not afraid of man are, on 

 that account, monsters of ferocity, and when they despoil 

 man's property, they are called utterly abominable ; while 

 the rhinoceros, grand old recluse of reedy hermitages, is 

 abused for having a horn on the tip of his nose, ^ust as the 



