Some Beasts of Reproach. 97 



hands sometimes grow curiously attached to their grunting 

 charges — 



" But now, alas ! these ears shall hear no more 

 The whining swine surround the dairy door ; 

 No more her care shall fill the hollow tray, 

 To fat the guzzling hogs with floods of whey. 

 Lament, ye swine ! in grumbling spend your grief, 

 For you, like me, have lost your sole relief." — Gay. 



And need I refer to the national affection that exists 

 between the Irish peasantry and their pigs? Among the 

 poets who refer to this Hiberian taste is Wilson — 



" Here streams of smoke the entering stranger greet; 

 Here man and beast with equal honours meet ; 

 The cow loud bawling fills the spattered door, 

 The sow and pigs grunt social round the floor ; 

 Dogs, cats, and ducks, in mingling groups appear, 

 And all that filth can boast of, riots here." 



In the matter of those bedevilled hogs of Gadara, and 

 the prodigal son, with other references to them in Holy 

 Writ, the pig arrives at some adventitious consequence. 

 Further dignity, too, attaches to him from the ceremonious 

 consumption at Yule-tide of his head, " crested with bays 

 and rosemary," and of the " brawne of the tusked swine " 

 that Chaucer respected so sincerely. Indeed, its complete 

 edibility (for which it has been called " a perfect gentle- 

 man, eatable from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail ") 

 set Islam a problem which, to this day, the Moulvies have 

 not solved. But it must be confessed that the poets are 

 very chary of compliments to swine, the sagacious truffle- 

 hunting animals "that grubbed the turf and taught man 

 where to look for dainty earth-nuts and nutritious roots," 

 and that, next to their " dirtiness," they seem to recognise 

 most keenly their absurdity. That they are credited with 

 seeing the wind gives them a joke against the pig, and the 

 ring in its nose, the curl in its tail, and the absence of wool 



G 



