The Great Dane 537 



chair of the "great king of Trace" in the "Knight's Tale." Chaucer was 

 an extensive traveller and went on his king's errands as far as Italy, and the 

 fact that he was an English poet has no bearing upon the question of the dog 

 being known in England, but there is evidence to that effect, we imagine, in 

 the crude illustrations from Bodleian library manuscripts. Here we find 

 the same muzzled dog with the erect ears, and from the earliest date until 

 1800, when Sydenham Edwardes gave us his triple illustration of the Dan- 

 ish dog, we find him the long-headed, clean-cut, muzzled dog. 



So highly valued were these good alaunts that they were not always per- 

 mitted to take part in the more dangerous sports of boar hunting and the 

 wolf chase. The rough work, in which the death of a dog would not matter 

 so much was undertaken by high-couraged dogs called mastins, from which 

 we got the name of matin in French — a dog which has no connection with the 

 English mastiff, except that both dogs were of mongrel or cross-breeding and 

 full of courage. Undoubtedly the alaunts were largely used, when not too 

 highly valued individually, in these sports, and we give a selection of illus- 

 trations by some of the leading European artists, showing the types of dogs 

 associated with boar and wolf hunting. As in some of these illustrations 

 there is more than one type of dog, it will not be possible to distribute them 

 as has been the case hitherto with illustrations from paintings where but one 

 breed has been shown. They nearly all appertain to what we have to say 

 regarding Great Danes and mastiffs; and as the chapter on the latter breed 

 follows this one, all the illustrations in both chapters should be looked over, 

 as they demonstrate clearly the precedence due the Great Dane. 



The earliest illustration we give is the study of a dog by Vittore 

 Pisano, who was bom in 1390, and we .have dated this study at 1425. 



"The Master of Game" illustrations, or more correctly the Gaston 

 Phoebus illustrations, date from about 1450, being recognised as represen- 

 tative of the art of the middle of the fifteenth century. The boar-hunting 

 scenes of Strada, about 1560, are not clear enough as to type to merit re- 

 production. He did not shine as a dog delineator, making all of them fat 

 and lusty. His attempts to foreshorten a short-headed dog were complete 

 failures, the head becoming flat and humanlike. In one boar-hunt, with 

 matchlocks, there is a short-faced dog with fringed hanging ears, but all the 

 others are long-headed, tapering, muzzled dogs of the mastin type, with 

 feathered ears and tail. Of almost the same period we have a most truthful 

 hunting picture by Antonius Tempesta, of Florence, which we date as about 



