Sovte Beasts of Reproach, 117 



Covers the latent death, with curious springs 

 Prepared to fly at once, whene'er the tread 

 Of man or beast unwarily shall press 

 The yielding surface. By th' indented steel 

 With gripe tenacious held, the felon grins 

 And struggles, but in vain ; yet oft 'tis known 

 When every art has failed, the captive fox 

 Has shared the wounded joint, and with a limb 

 Compounded for his life. But if, perchance. 

 In the deep pitfall plunged, there's no escape, 

 But unreprieved he dies, and bleached in air. 

 The jest of clowns, his reeking carcase hangs." 



" We 1 can but raise our feeble voice in mild protest 

 against the cruel misrepresentations to which the fox ia 

 exposed in Reineke Fuchs, wherein he is credited with ever) 

 vice under the sun, and wins his final victory over his 

 enemy Sir Isegrim by the basest perfidy on record. The 

 fox of natural history, we venture to plead, is not so bad 

 as all this. He is simply a robber — at once a highwayman, 

 burglar, and garotter — but he is not a hypocrite (at least, 

 more than his profession requires) ; and as to his private 

 morals, he is an excellent husband and/^r<f defamille, tak- 

 ing unusual pleasure in the sweets of domestic life and the 

 gambols of his infant offspring. . . • The stories about the 

 race are mostly base fabrications. Reineke Fuchs is, as we 

 have already said, one long unpardonable libel." 



Now "Reynard the Fox" is exactly the fox of poetr}-, 

 and, indeed, it is very possible, considering the extraordi 

 nary popularity of that " pleasant history," that the poets 

 really borrowed their Reynard from that ancient work. 



But in the Middle Ages the fox had a literature to itself, 

 and has been ever since one of the most conspicuous 

 features of folk-lore — but always in the same aspect of a 

 practical joker of a sinister kind. To my mind he resembles 

 the Manobohzo of Red-Indian legends, " the mischief- 



^ Francis Power Cobbe, "False Beasts and True." 



