THE RAT. 237 



THE BROWN OR GRAY RAT. 



SOME few years after the fatal period of 1688, when our aristocracy, 

 in defence of its ill-gotten goods, took upon itself to dispose of here- 

 ditary monarchy in a way which, if attempted now-a-days, would 

 cause a considerable rise in the price of hemp, there arrived on the 

 coast of England a ship from Germany freighted with a cargo of no 

 ordinary importance. In it was a sovereign remedy for all manner 

 of national grievances. Royal expenditure was to be mere moon- 

 shine, taxation as light as Camilla's footsteps, and the soul of man 

 was to fly up to heaven its own way. But the poet says 



" Dicique beatus 



Ante obitum nemo, supremaque funera debet;" 



that is, we must not expect supreme happiness on our side of the 

 grave. As a counterpoise to the promised felicity to be derived 

 from this super-excellent German cargo, there was introduced, either 

 by accident or by design, an article destined, at no far distant period, 

 to put the sons of Mr Bull in mind of the verses which I have just 

 quoted. This was no other than a little gray-coloured, short-legged 

 animal, too insignificant, at the time the cargo was landed, to attract 

 the slightest notice. It is known to naturalists sometimes by the 

 name of the Norwegian, sometimes by that of the Hanoverian rat. 

 Though I am not aware that there are any minutes in the zoological 

 archives of this country, which point out to us the precise time at 

 which this insatiate and mischievous little brute first appeared among 

 us, still there is a tradition current in this part of the country, that 

 it actually came over in the same ship which conveyed the new 

 dynasty to these shores. My father, who was of the first order of 

 field naturalists, was always positive on this point; and he main- 

 tained firmly that it did accompany the House of Hanover in its 

 emigration from Germany to England. Be this as it may, it is cer- 

 tain that the stranger rat has now punished us severely for more 

 than a century and a quarter. Its rapacity knows no bounds, while 

 its increase is prodigious beyond all belief. But the most singular 



