Asses and Apes. 121 



By Nature's hand magnificently fed, 

 His meal is on the range of mountains spread ; 

  As in pure air aloft he bounds along, 

 He sees in distant smoke the city throng ; 

 Conscious of freedom, scorns the smothered train, 

 The threat'ning driver, and the servile rein." ^ 



The poets, more poet ico, accept the dull significance of the 

 monkish fancy in preference to the more eloquent parable 

 of the scientific fact, and refer the cross to Calvary rather 

 than Central Africa. So Rogers, seeing " the panniered 

 ass browsing the hedge by fits," did not probably recognise 

 therein the old instinct of asinine vigilance when the wild 

 ass — "the ass of savage kind," as Watts calls it — grazed 

 only two steps at a time, and kept stopping between 

 mouthfuls to raise its head, in order to scan the horizon 

 and sniff the breeze. Nor perhaps did Wordsworth, who 

 saw the ass, 



" With motion dull 



Upon the pivot of his skull 



Turn round his long left ear," 



associate the gesture with days of suspicious freedom, when 

 the long left ear of the sentinel ass caught the first whisper 

 of approaching danger and gave timely warning to the herd 

 of otherwise fatal surprise. 



For once upon a time the wild asses, the onagers, were 

 the only representatives of the family, and they were so 

 swift of foot and so courageous that the east and the south 

 wore their hides as robes of honour, and kings and chiefs 

 took the wild ass for their cognisance and badge. It was 

 hunting an ass, then a royal sport, that Bairam, Prince of 

 Persia, lost his Hfe, plumping into the pool in the Vale of 

 Hf|u:is and being never seen again. Oriental children wore 

 shrlds of ass-skin round their necks that they might grow 

 up generous and brave. Did Ali, " the Lion of the Lord," 



^ Young's paraphrase of Job. 



