Lear’s Little Dogs. 
57 
Mr. Kirkman, in a very interesting paper on Animal 
Nature versus Human Nature in King Lear (New Shakspere 
Society’s Transactions, 1877), comments on the infinite 
pathos of the last touch of humiliation which the old 
king endures when he fancies that the— 
“ defection and disaffection of the palace has spread to the dogs. 
‘ The little dogs and all, 
Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me.’ 
(Lear, iii. 6, 65.) : 
It has a deep touch of human distress and disgrace equal to the bitter¬ 
ness of Anthony’s humiliation when the servant Thyreus derides his 
orders, and he feels the vile sting which a contemptible nature can so 
easily dart.” 
Edgar , his voice broken with tears, keeps up the delusion: 
“ e Tom will throw his head at them. 
Avaunt, you curs! 
Be thy mouth or black or white, 
Tooth that poisons if it bite; 
Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim, 
Hound or spaniel, brach or lym ; 
Or bobtail tike, or trundle-tail, 
Tom will make them weep and wail: 
For, with throwing thus my head, 
Dogs leap the hatch, and all are fled : ’ 
as if Lear’s uncontrollable mortification at the disaffection of the three 
pampered pets caught from their mistresses’ laps, had touched one of 
those cerebral chains of association we all know we possess, and he 
must needs run over the links.” 
Of domestic dogs the Mastiff, Ban-dog, or Mastiff 
Tie-dog, was the largest and most powerful. 
Mr. Jesse quotes the following passage from a trans¬ 
lation, by Barnaby Googe, of Conrad Heresbach’s Whole 
Art of Husbandry :— 
First the mastie that keepeth the house: for this purpose you must 
provide you such a one, as hath a large and a mightie body, a great 
and a shrill voyce, that both with his barking he may discover, and 
with his sight dismay the theefe, yea, being not seene, with the horror 
