THE FOX : HIS SCRIPTURAL REPUTATION. 
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execution, and who mistrusted some wickedness, having taken a 
notion to give the beast a lunge in the side with his sword, behold 
our fox, stuck to the quick, wakes up from his pretended lethargy 
and starts off before the eyes of the assembled spectators, carrying 
with him the sabre that had wounded him. 
The public functionary had to whistle for his weapon of office. 
Many writers relate that the fox has recourse to this stratagem 
when hunger presses, that he feigns death to draw within his 
reach the crows and other birds of prey that feed on carcasses. 
I can believe any thing of the fox, emblem of the shopkeeper, 
who appropriates the holes of the badger by odious methods con- 
demned by delicate noses, and whose entire existence is but a long 
series of rapine, swindling, and murders of new-born infants. 
Thus this cursed brood, whose political history is so black with 
crimes, has provoked everywhere and from the most distant times 
to our own, anathemas on its heads. 
The fox of the Holy Scripture is distinguished by three princi- 
pal qualities, which are insatiable voracity, fraud, and cruelty. 
Wherefore, St. Luke the evangelist represents under the emblem 
of the fox, Herod, Tetrarch of Judea. 
The sacred books also reproach the fox with cultivating no oth- 
er friendship among beasts than that of the serpent, dwelling both 
of them in dark caves. 
Ezekiel and the Canticles assimilate false prophets to foxes. Ori- 
gen and the other fathers of the church go further ; they assert 
that the devil clothes himself with a fox-skin, and the tradition 
continues into the middle ages. It is reproduced in the demoniac 
legends of our fathers, and encrusted in permanent myths in the 
stones of our cathedrals. 
We may see in niches of the choir of the curious church of 
Ciiiseaux (department of Soane and Loire), Satan under the form 
of a fox, extinguishing with his impure breath the flame of the Ho- 
ly Spirit. 
The book of Judges, the fasts of Ovid, Titus Livius, sacred as 
well as profane history, mention the employment of the fox in 
stratagems of war. Miany skeptics have objected to the vera- 
city of the history of the three hundred foxes, coupled two and 
