DOGS IN LONDON 253 
taken as evidence of its decadence—not of the 
individual but of the race or breed or variety. 
Whether this fact is known or only dimly surmised 
by dog-lovers, more especially by those who set 
the fashion in dogs, we see that in recent years 
there has been a distinct reaction against the more 
degenerate kinds*— those in whose natures the 
jackal and wild-dog writing has quite or all but 
faded out—the numerous small toy terriers; the 
Italian greyhound, shivering like an aspen leaf; 
the drawing-room pug, ugliest of man’s (the 
breeder’s) many inventions; the pathetic Blenheim 
and King Charles spaniels, the Maltese, the 
Pomeranian, and all the others that have, so to 
speak, rubbed themselves out by acquiring a white 
liver to please their owners’ fantastic tastes. A 
more vigorous beast is now in favour, and one of 
the most popular is undoubtedly the fox-terrier. 
This is assuredly the doggiest dog we possess, the 
most aggressive, born to trouble as the sparks fly . 
upward. From my own point of view it is only 
right that fox-terriers and all other good fighters 
should have liberty to go out daily into the streets 
in their thousands in search of shindies, to strive 
with and worry one another to their hearts’ content; 
1 Alas! since these notes were made, fourteen years ago, there has 
been a recrudescence of the purely woman’s drawing-room pet dog. 
The wretched griffon, looking like a mean cheap copy of the little 
Yorkshire—one of the few small pet animals which has not wholly lost 
its soul—appears to have vanished. But the country has now been 
flooded with the Pekinese, and one is made to loathe it from the 
constant sight of it in every drawing-room and railway carriage and 
motor-car and omnibus, clasped in a woman’s arms. 
