Asses and Apes. 135 



While in Shenstone, ambition " pricks up asses' ears ! ' 

 Again Rochester, in his attack upon Sir Car Scrope, makes 

 the knight both ape and ass — 



" When in thy person we more dearly see 

 That satire's of divine anthority. 

 For God made one on man when he made thee. 

 To show there were some men, as there are apes. 

 Framed for mere sport, who di&r bot in shapes : 

 In thee are all these contradictions joined. 

 That make an ass prodigious and refined." 



Yet the monkey is not a fool — certainly not " a fool of 

 the greatest size," as Christiana would say. In fables it is 

 often the butt of other creatures, but it is its inqtiisitiveness 

 as a rule that gets it into trouble, not its folly. The poets 

 describe it as half an idiot, and with very bad intentions — 

 " just skilled to know the right and choose the wrong " — 

 but I have so often myself taken advantage in their wild 

 forest state of their generous credulity and otherwise laud- 

 able thirst for knowledge, that I speak as an expert when 

 I say that though I have harmlessly astonished them with 

 trains of gunpowder and frightened a whole community 

 out of all gravity by striping one of their number an agree- 

 able vermilion, I never saw anything in their behaviour, 

 sober or drunk, composed or alarmed, that led me to think 

 them particularly foolish, as comjjared with men. Indeed, 

 when undisturbed in mind the monkey has a philosophical 

 gravity which attracts my admiration, although I confess 

 the alternating fits of monkey frivolity and indecorum 

 exasperate me. 



" Since Father Noah squeezed the grape 

 And took to such beharing 

 As would have shamed our giandsire ape 

 Before the days of shaving." ^ 



^ Wendell Holmes. 



