The King Charles Spaniel 723 



the ears are very large and well fringed and the hair of the body long, soft and 

 silky. The general colour is black and tan, or black and white, with the 

 limbs beautifully spotted and tanned mark over each eye." 



It is very evident that the closing description applies to the King 

 Charles and not to the Blenheim spaniel. 



Dalziel, who is usually sure to give some accurate piece of ancient his- 

 tory in his "British Dogs" is singularly silent regarding the King Charles 

 and also the Blenheim. He quotes Caius' reference to the dog of Malta, 

 or the comforter, and what he says agrees with our opinion expressed in the 

 chapter on the Maltese dog, that Caius was describing toy spaniels and not 

 what we call Maltese dogs. To Dalziel we are indebted for the unearthing 

 from Hollinshead's History, 1585, of an interpolation in Caius description, 

 or Fleming's translation thereof, as follows: "these puppies the smaller 

 they be, and, thereto, if they have a hole in the fore parts of their heads the 

 better are they accepted." Fleming's translation reads: "the smaller they 

 be the more pleasure they provoke. " Harrison's quotation was made from 

 the original latin text of Caius, according to the opinion of Dalziel, but that 

 is not material, for the point it develops is that at that time some spaniels 

 were developing the stop, yet we see no stop in the Van Dyck spaniels nor 

 in that shown in the picture of King Charles already referred to. The stop 

 as we have previously said comes naturally with the dome-or apple-head, 

 which is a development of the reduction to toy size. 



Another quotation in Dalziel is from an unnamed writer of 1802, who said 

 the King Charles "were supposed to be the small black curly sort which bear 

 his name, but they were more likely to have been of the distinct breed of 

 cockers, if judgment may be consistently formed from the pictures of Van 

 Dyck, in which they are introduced." 



We agree fully with Dalziel that we must accept these Van Dyck dogs 

 as being portraits of favourites and not indicative of breed type, and that is 

 exactly why we are adverse to the idea of these black and tans being entitled 

 to the name of King Charles so far as the paintings demonstrating any claim 

 to being specially favoured by him. We are not at all adverse to the black 

 and tans being called King Charles spaniels if it is accepted merely in recog- 

 nition of that monarch's partiality for toy spaniels, indeed rather than follow 

 the classification of the American Kennel Club in seeking to suppress the 

 names the English toy spaniels have long been called and merely divide 

 them by colour, we would favour calling all but the Blenheims by the royal 



