262 The Poets Beasts. 



pastoral ; and goats — more common than sheep in the 

 countries where that myth originated — have always their 

 appropriate prominence. 



Goatherds differ from shepherds only as their charges 

 differ, being more picturesque and in a manner more 

 vagabond. They are described in prose, in Don Quixote 

 and Gil Bias, for instance, as of a more active, aggressive, and 

 enterprising kind than the Gentle Shepherd. Byron's little 

 goatherd "in his white capote, leaning his boyish form 

 along the rock," affords a pleasing vignette from the rocks, 

 and many speak of him as delighting, like the guardian of 

 the sheep, in music. 



" Meantime on earlier pipe a lowly lay, 



As my kids browse obscure in shades, I play." 



Following goats naturally called for a greater robustness 

 of limb and character, and so, though we occasionally find 

 in the poets an " Acantha roaming in thymy valleys, tending 

 her milk-white goats and gathering honey," the goatherdess 

 is a very rare phenomenon. It may be feminine enough 

 to follow the "silly sheep" among their level pastures; but 

 trying to keep order among goats, or clambering after them 

 to lend assistance to adventurous kids in distress, is scarcely 

 becoming to the sex. 



Of the antiquity of their domestication we have some 

 evidence from the first sacrifice, from which we learn that 

 they were kept in herds by the second generation of man- 

 kind ; and we may, therefore, without any unreasonable 

 license of assumption, suppose that the First Man, "the 

 old gardener," was a goatherd also. By what devices our 

 great Progenitor circumvented the original goat we are not 

 told. But they were not, probably, very different from 

 those by which Robinson Crusoe caught his. For that 

 Adam, cast upon the desert island of the earth outside of 

 ]'aradisc, had a dog for a companion, the traditions of 



