Some Harmless Beasts. 147 



Thomson, Montgomer)', and Drayton, all, curiously enough, 

 like to think of it as coeval with the trees among which it 

 lives — " its old contemporary trees." Equally familiar is 

 the fiction of the elephant sleeping standing, in consequence 

 of its having no joints in its legs — as thus, in Swift and 

 Herbert — 



" For elephants ne'er bend the knee." 

 " Most things sleep lying ; the elephant leans or stands." 



Montgomery also has — 



" The palm which he was wont to make 

 His prop in slumber." 



Another agreeable fiction is the hereditary feud which 

 the elephant maintains against its neighbour the rhinoceros. 

 Says Adam (in Cowper) — 



" Behold that dusky beast 



That with white tusks of an enormous size extends its weighty jaw ; 



That now forgetting to revere the moon, 



Intractable, 'erocious, beyond its native temper, 



Rushes in anger with its fibrous trunk that serves it for a nose, 



Against the horn which the rhinoceros sharpens of hardest stone." 



Was ever greafer nonsense given to the world before as 

 poetry ? Cowper knew something about hares' rumps, but 

 nothing about rhinoceros' horns or elephants' noses. And 

 imagine Adam, who was a thorough naturalist not only by 

 inspiration but personal observation, talking in such slif>- 

 shod manner about a beast he knew so well — presuming it 

 to have existed. And the suspicion of plagiarism is added 

 to the absurdity by reading in Glover how — 



" In the wastes of India, while the earth 

 Beneath him groans, the elephant is seen 

 His huge proboscis writliing, to defy 

 The strong rhinoceros, whose pond'rous horn 

 Is newly whetted on a rock."^ 



^ Pliny Fays, on an agate, hence this frequent error. 



