556 The Dog Book 



such a very large dog — ^there is nothing immense about it. Following 

 closely upon the heels of the Bewick productions we have the numerous 

 etchings by Howitt; and, while giving due credit to Bewick for what he ac- 

 complished as an illustrator, there is no question but that Howitt far sur- 

 passed the wood-engraver in his ability to catch the spirit of his dog. Howitt 

 seems to have taken cognisance of two varieties of mastiff, the house dog and 

 the sporting dog. From Bingley's "Quadrupeds" (1809) we give Howitt's 

 house or farm mastiff. Wynn repudiated this representation altogether, 

 and in opposition to it sent us for publication in the American Kennel 

 Register a sketch which he made of a church grotesque and an etching of a 

 cropped and docked dog of strong boarhound indications. This Howitt 

 mastiff and Bewick's, while dissimilar, are yet very similar. Both are 

 sizeable, well built dogs, indicating great strength, each skull is flat and of 

 good length; good strong foreface, and this mastiff of Howitt's has un- 

 cropped ears much smaller than those of the Bewick mastiff. 



Howitt had another mastiff, the fighting or baiting dog, and he made 

 it sufficiently different from some of his bulldogs to permit of making a 

 shrewd guess as to which is the mastiff. From a collection of about 

 a dozen of Howitt's etchings we select enough to make a page of illustra- 

 tions showing more divergence in size, perhaps, than in type. These 

 baiting mastiffs are all cropped, and when we take up the mastiffs which 

 date from 1800 to 1830 it will be found that quite a number were 

 cropped and docked. It should be said that he also etched cropped bull- 

 dogs very similar to his mastiffs. 



Etchings and engravings of Alpine mastiffs are by no means uncom- 

 mon and we give one that was drawn by Edwin Landseer and etched by his 

 brother Thomas, also a smooth St. Bernard dog from Sir William Jardine's 

 "Naturalist's Library" (1840), this smooth being a dog named Bass owned 

 by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder of Edinburgh, who got it from the Hospice in 

 1837. These two illustrations are given in connection with the St. Bernard 

 chapter, which follows. Wynn draws attention to this picture of Bass, and 

 says that but for the difference in colour of the markings it was exactly like 

 a Spanish mastiff that Bill George offered him for twenty pounds, about the 

 year 1863. George's mastiff was black about the head, while Bass is shown 

 with bright tawney, without any darker shadings. In view of the many 

 references about to be made to Alpine mastiffs it will be well to turn to the 

 illustrations referred to, and to note the type of these dogs. That these for- 



