I lo The Poets' Beasts. 



Egypt, meanwhile, it had attracted attention, been adopted 

 into the menagerie of worship, and solemnly dedicated to 

 Darkness. Rome and Greece took their bat from Egypt, 

 and we find the bat drawing the car of Nox through the 

 sky, and transformation into the bat one of the gloomiest 

 penalties within the imagination of the myth-maker. 



Here and there, however, it is redeemed from oppro- 

 brium, as by the Moslem legend of Isa making a bat, 

 " Khopash," out of clay and endowing it with life, so that 

 it might come and tell him in his seclusion among the 

 mountains when the sunset-hour for the suspension of the 

 Ramazan fast approached. 



So to-day we find this useful little" animal, a mouse on 

 wings, regarded by a majority of mankind with apprehen- 

 sion and dislike. Its appearance when seated is certainly 

 against it ; but on the wing it is the very incarnation of 

 buoyant happiness. Under the inquiries of science its 

 amazing sensitiveness to touch, amounting indeed almost 

 to the possession of a new sense, has been the admiration 

 of naturalists, while its extraordinary suspension of life for 

 part of the ^^2X (differing altogether in character and degree 

 (frows^'^^^^'^-sr^^^tion of dormice and bears) ranks certainly 

 from the weinJ^ders of Nature. But apart from science, is 

 from another a gratitude due to a creature that has ventured 

 iginality in the matter of nose ? It is horn- 

 ■sed, sometimes it wears a crest on the top of 

 "'^' a fleur-de-lys, sometimes a mimic horse-shoe ; 

 ys fantastic and unexpected. It is the very 

 This is permits. 



that its gnor:he fox" for my subject, I should be over- 

 enwrapped a it, for Reynard covers a whole volume of 

 which is impi.olk-lore. But, fortunately, it is only the poets' 

 the wings of terns me, and this is a very meagre and single- 

 darkness." . Not that it does not abound in verse — it 

 bat itself obf.ut, then, it is always the same old fox. It has 



