Shakspeare’s Estimate of the Dog. 183 
Lear” which runs: “Mine enemy’s dog, though he had 
bit me, should have stood that night against my fire.” 
In her excellent work on “The Animal Lore of Shak- 
speare’s Time,’ Miss Phipson quotes an incident from Sir 
Henry Holland’s “Recollections of Past Life” strikingly 
illustrative of this indifference or dislike: “Lord Nugent, 
the greatest Shakspearian scholar of his day, declared that 
no passage was to be found in Shakspeare commending, 
directly or indirectly, the moral qualities of the dog. A 
bet of a guinea was made, which Sir Henry, after a year’s 
search, paid. This was before the publication of Mrs. 
Cowden Clarke’s Concordance. The only passage which 
could have a chance of winning the wager is the answer 
of Timon: 
AprEM.—What man didst thou ever know unthrift that 
was beloved, after his means P 
Tim.—Who, without those means thou talk’st of, didst thou 
ever know beloved? 
Aprmu.—Myself. 
Tim.—I understand thee; thou hadst some means to keep 
w dog: Timon of Athens, Act IV., Sc. 3, 113.” 
There is a fine subtlety in this, which ought to have 
entitled Sir Henry to the guinea, and goes far to atone 
for the general attitude of hostility exhibited by Shakspeare. 
Throughout all literature, from the time of Homer—except- 
ing among the Hebrews—there has been a generous recogni- 
tion of those moral qualities in the dog which have probably 
become evolved in him through long association with a 
being who, rightly or wrongly, has held in his esteem the 
place of a god. 
The development of the dog’s mental and moral character 
under domestication is indisputable, though some wild species 
exhibit an extraordinary intelligence in circumstances where 
man must be quite an unfamiliar animal to them, and where 
they could have had no previous experience of his machina- 
tions for compassing their destruction. Some years ago, there 
