SoTne Harmless Beasts. 157 



ness, and round it gather centuries of the history of the 

 nations of the red men. 



Kangaroos are not poetical beasts in the poets' sense, 

 and except, therefore, when they are made fun of, as in 

 Hood's verses, receive no attention — 



" A pair of married kangaroos 



(The case is oft a human one too) 

 Were greatly puzzled once to choose 



A trade to put their eldest son Xo. 

 It came — no thought was ever brighter — 



In weighing every why and whether 

 They jumped upon it both tc^ether. 



Let's make the imp a shorthand writer." 



Lovelace refers to them vaguely as " cubs of India," and, 

 addressing the snail, says that, like them — 



" Thon from thjrself a while dost play. 

 But, frighted by a dog or gun, 

 In thine own l>elly thou dost run ; " 



which is a delightful confusion of epitaphs. 



Some score of allusions to the beaver are to be found 

 in the pcets, but they present nothing of interest As a 

 " furry nation " and " fur-bearing," also as supposed to 

 furnish a perfume, they are benignly treated, for conducing 

 to the best of their small abilities to the welfare of lordly 

 humanity. But, so far as the poets are concerned, they are 

 things of prodigious solitude " where earth's unli\-ing silence 

 all would seem, save where on rocks the beaver built his 

 dome " — a passage characteristic of blundering Campbell 

 — and the comrade in Mackay's " Arctic Regions " of 

 " the white wolf that howls to the moon." Dyer, too, has 

 some delightful nonsense about it. 



In Darwin, however, it is the "half-reasoning" beaver, 

 and Drayton preserves the following very interesting fact of 

 British natural history- in his quaint rhyme — 



