2o8 The Poets Beasts. 



the majority seem unable to do this ; they have not the 

 strength for impartiaUty; they keep themselves perpen- 

 dicular with sprawling buttresses of prejudice. 



To illustrate this. The wild boar is a noble beast ; he is 

 the counterpart of the noblest men of an earlier age; a 

 Charles Martel, Charles the Bold, Charles XII. — a grand 

 creature, who treats the odds against him as children treat 

 chronology, as something that he neither understands nor 

 cares to. He takes victory by the ears and drags her along 

 with him into battle. But in poetry none of the courage, 

 this perfection of heroism, is carried to the boar's credit ; 

 it all goes to that of the hunters or the boar-hounds. The 

 latter beset it, and do it to death with weapons, nets, and 

 stress of numbers. They are " heroic," but the boar is only 

 " savage." 



The stag, again. He is stately and fleet of foot. But if 

 this is true of the quarry, what shall we say, the poets ask, 

 of the men and the stag-hounds that hunt it down ? The 

 hare and the otter are wonderfully cunning, but what fools 

 they are compared to the craft of human kind ! The fox, 

 too, what do its wiles avail when outraged man is on its 

 racks, thirsting to avenge the duckling and the chicken ? 



In the poem on " The Chase " Somerville ranges over 

 half the animal kingdom; but, as far as British poets are con- 

 cerned, the beasts of sport are virtually only five — the wild 

 boar, deer, fox, hare, and otter. The wild-cat, as is proved 

 by old manorial charters, was once included in the list, but 

 it is not a poet's beast 



Incidentally, of course, every quadruped that finds notice 

 in verse is referred to in its relation to man — that of the 

 hunted to the hunter — but, as objects of the chase, the 

 animals finally resolve themselves into the mystic five. The 

 chief of these is the boar. 



Homer, describing the outrush of the brothers Ajax, 

 employs it as a simile — 



