467 



CHAPTER LIV. 

 THE ITALIAN GREYHOUND AND THE MINIATURE CCLLIE. 



'An English dog can't take an airing 

 But foreign scoundrels must be staring. 

 I'd have your French dogs and your Spanish, 

 And all your Dutch and all your Danish, 

 By which our species is confounded, 

 Be hanged, be poisoned, and be drownded ; 

 No mercy on the race suspected. 

 Greyhounds from Italy excepted." 



Christopher Smart. 



THE most elegant, graceful, and re- 

 fined of all dogs are the tiny Italian 

 Greyhounds. Their exquisitely deli- 

 cate hues, their supple movements and 

 beautiful attitudes, their soft, large eyes, 

 their charming colouring, their gentle and 

 loving nature, and tlieir scrupulous clean- 

 liness of habit — all these quahties justify 

 the admiration bestowed upon them as 

 drawing-room pets. They are fragile, it 

 is true — fragile as egg-shell china — not to be 

 handled roughly. But their constitution is 

 not necessarily delicate, and many have 

 been known to h\-e to extreme old age. Miss 

 Mackenzie's Jack, one of the most beauti- 

 ful of the breed ever known, lived to see his 

 seventeenth birthday, and even then was 

 strong and healthy. Tlieir fragility is more 

 apparent than real, and if they are not ex- 

 posed to cold or damp, they require less 

 pampering than they usually recei^•e. An 

 American writer once gave elaborate instruc- 

 tions as to the way to pick up an Itahan 

 Greyhound without breaking it, as if it 

 were a Prince Rupert drop that would 

 shatter to dust with the least touch. Such 

 particularity is unnecessary. One would 

 suppose that our American friend had come 

 upon an unusually frail specimen that had 

 been rendered weak by too much inbreed- 

 ing. This cause has been a frequent source 

 of constitutional weakness, and it was 

 deplorably a fault in the Italian Greyhounds 

 of half a centur\- ago. Gowan's Billy, who 

 was celebrated about the year 1857 for his 



grace and symmetrj% and who was altogether 

 a lovely animal, was a notorious victim of 

 inbreeding. His grandsire. great grand- 



ROSEMEAD UNA AND ROSEMEAD LAURA. 



BRED AND OWNED BY THE BARONESS 

 CAMPBELL VON LAURENTZ 

 Photograph by Rusull. 



sire, g.-g. -grandsire, g.-g.-g.-grandsire, and 

 g.-g.-g.-g.-grandsire were all one and the 

 same dog. This is probably the record 

 example of consanguinity. 



One cannot be quite certain as to the 

 derivation of the Italian Greyhound. Its 

 physical appearance naturally suggests a 

 descent from the Gazehound of the ancients, 

 with the added conjecture that it was pur- 

 posely dwarfed for the convenience of being 

 nursed in the lap. Greek art presents many 

 examples of a very small dog of Greyhound 

 type, and there is a probabihty that the 



