APPRECIATIONS OF MR. LONG 
AND -ELIS= WORK 
From The Boston Transcript 
THE WORK OF WILLIAM J. LONG 
BY RICHARD BURTON 
HE nature and animal sketches 
of William J. Long have a 
worthy part in a tendency of 
recent literature which is at 
once welcome and significant. 
The beast epic, so called of 
scholars, has a long and honor- 
able lineage in prose and poetry. 
Ever since “sop —and indeed 
before that Eastern masterpiece 
got itself into print—the animal had a place in the 
imaginative depiction of life in letters, and has been 
used for purposes of instruction quite as much as for 
the amusement to be derived from such a piquant 
motif. Reynard the Fox—the German Reinecke 
Fuchs — may be mentioned as a type of the treatment 
of the beast in allegory by the older writers; and in the 
hands of masters like La Fontaine or Goethe, our 
older brothers the beasts have become an integral and 
well-loved section of folklore and later poetry. The 
naive handling of this sympathetic subject in our day 
by Joel Chandler Harris, whose “ Br’er Rabbit ” is so 
dear to the properly reared modern child, is the out- 
growth of a vast amount of literature like to it, at 
least, in respect that the animals are the persons of 
the play instead of human beings. 
But with the incoming of the scientific age and the 
general acceptance of the principle of evolution to 
explain the progressive manifestations of life upon the 
broad surface of Mother Earth, —as well as in the vital 
air and under the waves of Father Ocean, — there has 
naturally come a changed attitude toward the animal 
existence below and before man in the great story of 
biologic development. Man has drawn closer to brute 
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