292 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
one of the most horrible forms of cruelty practised on animals, 
had a book in the press entitled “ The Friend of Man and his 
Friends, the Poets.” Reading my unsigned paper in the 
Magazine, she picked up her pen in a noble rage to add some 
words to her Introduction, in which she hurled at me certain 
sayings of Schopenhauer describing man as a very contempti- 
ble creature when compared with the dog, and also saying that 
the writer of the article was “worse than a vivisectionist.” 
This struck me as a bit thick, seeing that a vivisectionist 
had always been to her the most damnable being in the uni- 
verse. One or two of my friends, who knew I had written the 
article, then remonstrated with the lady for using such ex- 
pressions of one who, though tactless and somewhat brutal, 
was also a lover of all the creatures, and didn’t like to hear 
so much praise of the dog at the expense of the other animals. 
The result was that she smoothed her ruffled plumes and sent 
her regrets and a promise to excise the obnoxious passage in 
her preface in the next edition. 
Of course it doesn’t matter two straws whether she ever 
had the opportunity of doing so or not: the best part of the 
story is still to come—the funny part, and a wise word which, 
though laughingly spoken, may yet do good. 
The lady’s book in the meantime had fallen by chance into 
the hands of Andrew Lang, and as it was just the sort of 
thing to delight him, he made it the subject of one of his most 
charming amusing leaders in the Daily News of that time. In 
this article, after the usual pleasant word for the book and its 
author, he deals with the subject of the dog and man’s feeling 
for it in ancient and modern times, and of the great length to 
which it has been carried recently, and concludes with a pas- 
sage which I must quote in full, as I don’t think this article 
ever reappeared among his Lost Leaders, and it is worth pre- 
serving for the sake of its Andrew Langishness, as well as of 
its moral. After quoting some of the most notable sayings in 
praise of the dog, he concludes: 
“There is perhaps some slight danger of reaction against all 
this, and Miss Cobbe seems to have anticipated it in a sharp 
attack on a writer hostile to dogs. This writer, as though 
in his turn anticipating the coming worship of the dog, has 
expressed himself with considerable force against the ‘ great 
dog superstition,’ and has gone so far as to characterise 
