650 The Dog Book 



hard "g," which would have become palatalised, such as in the case of 

 beadle in English and beagle in Scotland for somewhat similar officials. 

 That is worth keeping in mind, but in addition there was an old West of 

 England word beagle, which meant a loutish fellow, a ne'er-do-well, and in 

 Jamieson's Scotch dictionary beagle is given as a Teviotdale expression for 

 a man of odd appearance, such as in the case of one falling in the mire who 

 would be said to be "a pretty beagle." 



Neither of these renderings could have been the one meant by James 

 I. when he wrote an endearing letter to his wife and called her his "little 

 beagle" and his "pretty beagle." At the same time we must not overlook 

 the possibilities of a meaning which might be applied to the word in the West 

 of England sense of useless. The small hound was certainly of little use 

 for the game the mighty hunters affected, and to them the play dog of the 

 children or pet of the ladies of the household might aptly be called a beagle 

 in that sense. Still another possibility is the Gaelic word "beag." This 

 is a diminutive and in " beag-luach " we have a compound word meaning "of 

 little value." Practically the same meaning as the West of England appli- 

 cation of the word beagle. "Beag" by itself meant a little, a small number, 

 a small quantity. 



Only one authority mentions "beag" but he discards it as improbable. 

 The objection to Gaelic origin is the lack of connection between where that 

 was spoken and where beagle became definitely connected with the dog. 

 But how about pony, for a small horse ? That is Gaelic and became in 

 some way substituted for hobby, a small horse, a word still retained in 

 the words hobby horse, hobby hawk and hobby itself. Who first intro- 

 duced "toy" to cover the group of pets, little dogs, and how long was it at- 

 taining its present acceptance as defining a group of many breeds ? If we 

 take into consideration what the dogs were that got the name of beagles 

 and really established the name as confined to the particular variety of 

 hounds we will more readily arrive at where the name came from. 



The dog was first described as of most diminutive size, so small that it 

 was called a glove beagle — gauntletted gloves, of course — its voice was so 

 small compared with that of hounds that another name for them was " sing- 

 ing beagles, " a pack getting the name of " a cry, " and efforts were made to 

 get voices of different tones to chime melodiously. Good Queen Bess, who 

 upheld bear baiting and took part in coursing deer, could hardly have 

 treated her beagles seriously and we can well believe that these diminutive 



