346 The Dog Book 



gave to the collie. We find it in Bewick's "Shepherd's Dog;" in Howitt's 

 beautiful etching in Bingley's Quadrupeds, which was entitled "The 

 Shepherd's Dog," with the sub title of "Curr"; in "Brown's Anecdotes," 

 published in 1829; ^"^ i" ^" illustration of the collies, both rough and 

 smooth, of 1843, given in "The Twentieth Century Dog." All show the 

 same upward curl and twist to one side of the end of the tail. Nowadays it 

 is described as a wry tail, and is as much condemned as if it was the twisted 

 tail of some cockerel at a poultry show. We have seen it in a good many 

 dogs, and, all standards to the contrary, we like it and look upon it as thor- 

 oughly characteristic. 



Quite a number of writers on the collie have quoted from Caius's 

 description of the "shepherd's dogge" in treating of the rough collie, but 

 he did not write of that dog at all, but the light mastiff or bandog, which 

 was used as a sheep dog. If we recognise that mastiff meant simply mongrel 

 or common dog, and that it included pretty nearly everything outside of 

 hounds, spaniels and terriers, and not a specified breed such as we know 

 mastiffs, we will the more readily understand what produced the English 

 sheep dog, and that, as we have already said, he is not a collie proper, 

 though now known in England as the smooth collie. As Caius wrote only 

 of the smooth dog, he will be quoted in the chapter on that breed. 



We have already mentioned that it was probable the term collie was 

 confined to parts of Scotland, and that it found headway down the east 

 coast as far as Northumberland, where Bewick gives it as applied to both 

 rough and smooth, and also gives the first representation of the rough dog 

 as early as 1790. This was along the main highway from Edinburgh to 

 England. That it was by no means universal even as late as 1825 may 

 be proved by reference to Captain Brown's "Anecdotes," 1829, '" which 

 there are fifty pages of quoted stories about these dogs. We have gone 

 through these anecdotes and found that in the first twenty pages the collie 

 is either shepherd dog or merely dog. The first use of "coUey" is in a 

 quotation from Blackwood' s Magazine, from a communication by Hogg, 

 "The Ettrick Shepherd." As it is a very good illustration of the several 

 names applied to the rough dog at that time in his section of South Scotland, 

 we will quote two full paragraphs: 



" It is a curious fact in the history of these animals that the most useless 

 of the breed have often the greatest degree of sagacity in trifling and useless 

 matters. An exceedingly good sheep dog attends to nothing else but that 



