Some Beasts of Reproach. 8 7 



hedgehog and porcupine are calumniated for having quills 

 on their backs. 



The monkeys, again, another large and admirable feature 

 of wild nature, are pelted with unmitigated scorn because 

 they seem to resemble man, and can be taught to burlesque 

 him, as if the poets really believed that all the monkeys of 

 the world live in cages .or on barrel-organs. Or take 

 another class, the foxes and jackals, delightful parables 

 both of them, or the hysena, one of the gloomiest touches 

 in Nature, and we find it is the same, and that the poets 

 are similarly deficient in sympathy and tenderness. Now, 

 for myself, keeping no poultry-yard, I like young foxes just 

 as much as I do chickens or ducklings ; and having no 

 friends buried in Syria or Abyssinia, I can view the hysena 

 apart from corpses. For the poets, of course, it will be 

 argued that they project themselves into the affections of 

 others, and feel for the chickens of neighbours and the 

 graves of Ethiopians as keenly as if they were their own. 



T had once in India a favourite dog carried off by a 

 leopard ; yet I do not hate leopards on that account. I 

 also kept a pet leopard once, and I liked it just as much as 

 I did the terrier which its relatives previously consumed. 

 The leopard did* quite right to eat my dog, even though it 

 might have known it would provoke me to ill-nature by 

 doing so ; and though I should have been glad at the time 

 to see that particular one murdered, I certainly bore no 

 grudge against all the leopards of the world, much less 

 against all their glorious congeners as well. So that the 

 poets, even after they have presumably projected their sym- 

 pathies into everybody's hen-roost and thus absorbed the 

 concentrated sentiments of all the poultry-fanciers of the 

 world, are still, I take it, not justified in abusive generalities 

 about foxes. That these pretty beasts eat chickens is solely 

 our own fault, for we have deprived them of every other 

 source of food. But the great majority of foxes in the world 



