to England, where he lived and died, an honored pensioner, in the house
of Mrs. Leigh.
[Illustration: LORD BYRON AND HIS DOG LYON.]
Mrs. Radcliffe, whose novels delighted and terrorized our
grandmothers, had two dogs, called Fan and Dash. Fan had been a mangy,
poverty-stricken beast, condemned by its rustic owner to be hung. In a
lucky hour the novelist happened by, purchased the guiltless criminal
for half a crown; and Fan, cured of the mange, grown plump and silky,
became so beautiful a dog that Queen Charlotte, when out walking with
her brood of young princesses, would stop to notice her. On one of
these occasions Fan and one of the royal spaniels caught simultaneously
the ends of a long bone; and for some distance this foundling of the
people and the pet of royalty pranced on amicably together, holding
the bone between them!
Dash was a poor street dog whose leg had been run over and broken.
He was taken in a coach to the doctor’s, the leg was set, health and
strength returned, and Dash was more than himself again, for now he was
“Mrs. Radcliffe’s dog.”
Another Dash lived first with Thomas Hood, then with Charles Lamb; he
made such a slave of the latter, that finally Miss Lamb wrote to Mr.
Patmore, entreating him to remove the dog, “if only out of charity; for
if we keep him much longer, he will be the death of Charles.”
The transfer took place, and the late victim’s spirits rose to
high-water mark soon afterwards in this whimsical, charming letter:
DEAR PATMORE:
Excuse my anxiety, but how is Dash?... Goes he muzzled or _apesto
ore_? Are his intellects sound, or does he wander a little in his
conversation? You cannot be too careful to watch the first symptoms
of incoherence. The first illogical snarl he makes, off with him to
St. Luke’s.... Try him with hot water: if he won’t lick it up, it
is a sign he does not like it. Does his tail wag horizontally or
perpendicularly? That has decided the fate of many dogs in Enfield.
Is his general deportment cheerful? I mean, when he is pleased--for
otherwise there is no judging. You can’t be too careful. Has he bit
any of the children yet? If he has, have them shot, and keep him for
curiosity, to see if it was the hydrophobia.... You might pull out his
teeth (if he would let you), and then you need not mind if he were as
mad as Bedlamite.... I send my love in a ---- to Dash.
C. LAMB.
A great contrast to this tyrant was Mouse, the loving, jealous little
terrier of Douglas Jerrold. A source of much gentle mirth while her
master was well and strong, she did her utmost to comfort his dying
hours. Once more, as she nestled beside him, his thin hand rested on
her head; once more, and for the last time, he called her faintly by
name; then they removed her, and in a few hours Mouse was masterless.
Horace Walpole’s dogs furnished many an amusing item for his letters,
and diverted his friends no less than himself. “Sense and fidelity,”
said he, “are wonderful recommendations; when one meets with them ... I
cannot think the two additional legs are any drawback.”
Tory, Patapan, Rosette, Touton and a host of others, were the living
illustrations in his home of this belief.
Tory, the “prettiest, fattest, dearest” King Charles, might have been
leaner with advantage to himself, for a wolf snapped him up as he was
waddling behind his master’s carriage in the Alps.
Patapan is the little aristocrat whom you see beside Mr. Walpole in the
picture. The whims of “His Patapanic Majesty” were all indulged, his
tastes consulted; his master idolized, and royalty itself caressed him;
finally his vanity, already large, was puffed out like a balloon, by
Mr. Chute’s poem in his praise. Thus it sums up his perfections:
“Patá is frolicsome, and smart
As Geoffrey once was--(oh! my heart),
He’s purer than a turtle’s kiss,
And gentler than a little miss;
A jewel for a lady’s ear,
And Mr. Walpole’s pretty dear.”
When the pretty dear was frisking through Strawberry Hill, he may very
likely have brushed in his frolics against a great bowl of blue and
white china occupying a place of honor in one of the rooms.
[Illustration: SIR HORACE WALPOLE AND PATAPAN.]
But the label would not have told him, as it does us, that this was the
veritable “Tub of Gold Fishes” in which the favorite cat of Thomas
Grey was drowned. “Demurest of the tabby kind”--Selima gazed at the
fish, and longed; extended “a whisker first and then a claw;” and then--
“The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.”
She may have found some comfort--since drown she must--in the vase
being genuine old china; just as Clarence preferred drowning in Malmsey
wine to water; but her best comfort--had she known it--was the poem
to be written on her fate, the poem which still points her morals and
adorns her tale.
No one, in this group of literary people, was so intimate with cats as
Southey. He delighted in them, he admired them, he understood them, and
he thought no house quite furnished unless it had a baby and a kitten!
It was to his little daughter Edith that this author dedicated his
history of the cats of Greta Hall, which he intended to supplement
by the Memoirs of Cats’ Eden. Unfortunately for us all, the last was
never finished. The most delightful of philofelists--to use his own
coinage--he tells the story of his cats _con amore_; from the fate
untimely of Ovid, Virgil, and Othello, to the merited honors heaped
upon Lord Nelson, a great carrot-colored cat promoted by him to the
highest rank in the peerage, through all its degrees, under the titles
of His Serene Highness, the Archduke Rumpelstilzchen, Marquis Mac-Bum,
Earl Tomlemagne, Baron Raticide, Waswlher and Skaratchi. Felicitous
titles, are they not?
But how the list lengthens! Only a word can be given to Emily Brontë
with her faithful, sullen mastiff Keeper; to Charlotte Brontë, with her
black-and-white curly-haired Flossy; to Bulwer, with his Newfoundland
Terror, and his better loved Andalusian horse; to Mrs. Bulwer--herself
a beautiful spoiled child--with her beautiful spoiled Blenheim, Fairy,
described by Disraeli as “no bigger than a bird of paradise, and quite
as brilliant”--a Fairy that had its own printed visiting cards, and
paid fashionable calls with its mistress; to Charles Reade, of keen
wit and large heart, who petted squirrels, hares, and deer, as well as
dogs, who wept when the exigencies of Never too Late to Mend required
him to kill Carlo, and who humorously advised Ouida to name one of her
dogs Tonic, as he was “a mixture of steal and w(h)ine.”
[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS’S PET RAVEN, GRIP.]
Charles Kingsley’s pets, and those of Charles Dickens, have been so
often and so fully described, that any further description seems
superfluous. Timber, Turk and Linda, Mrs. Bouncer, Bumble and Sultan,
were only a few of his many dogs; while Dick the canary--“best of
birds”--a succession of kittens, an eagle, and various ravens, were
among the pets that kept matters lively at Gadshill.
Of the ravens, the most famous was Grip, who sat for his portrait in
Barnaby Rudge, and whose stuffed body still exists.
There are no brighter letters, no finer poems in literature, than those
which “Flush, my Dog,” called out from Mrs. Browning--letters and verse
so vivid, so delicately discriminative, that they amply supply the
lack of other portraiture, and in them Flush still lives. Listen:
“Like a lady’s ringlets brown,
Flow thine silken ears adown
Either side demurely
Of thy silver-suited breast,
Shining out from all the rest
Of thy body purely.
“Darkly brown thy body is
Till the sunshine striking this,
Alchemize its dullness;
When the sleek curls manifold
Flash all over into gold,
With a burnished fullness.
“Leap! thy broad tail waves a light;
Leap! thy slender feet are bright,
Canopied in fringes.
Leap! those tasseled ears of thine
Flicker strangely fair and fine
Down their golden inches.”
How clearly we see him with that gentlest mistress, bathed in the warm,
sweet sunshine of the past! But there were other than sunny days--long,
weary days in a sick-room, where--
“This dog only waited on,
Knowing that when light is gone,
Love remains for shining.
“Other dogs in thymy dew
Tracked the hares, and followed through
Sunny moor or meadow--
This dog only crept and crept
Next a languid cheek that slept,
Sharing in the shadow.”
What wonder that she returned his love with--
--“more love again
Than dogs often take of men”?
Flush was a gift from Miss Mitford, another authoress devoted to
dogs; and the rival claims of these ladies for their pets, may still
pleasantly amuse us. “How is your Flushie?” inquires Miss Mitford.
“Mine becomes every day more and more beautiful, and more and more
endearing. His little daughter Rose is the very moral of him, and
another daughter (a puppy four months old, your Flushie’s half-sister)
is so much admired in Reading that she has already been stolen four
times--a tribute to her merit which might be dispensed with; and her
master having offered ten pounds reward, it seems likely enough that
she will be stolen four times more. They are a beautiful race, and that
is the truth of it.”
Now hear Miss Barrett (as she was at this time) telling Mr. Horne:
“Never in the world was another such dog as my Flush. Just now,
because after reading your note, I laid it down thoughtfully without
taking anything else up, he threw himself into my arms, as much as to
say, ‘Now it’s my turn. You’re not busy at all now.’ He understands
every thing I say, and would not disturb me for the world. Do not tell
Miss Mitford--but her Flush, (whom she brought to see me) is not to be
compared to mine! quite animal and dog--natural, and incapable of my
Flush’s hyper-cynical refinement.”
“My Flush,” she writes elsewhere, “my Flush, who is a gentleman.”
Our next glimpse of this well-bred favorite is due to Mr. Westwood,
a friend and correspondent of the lady. “On one occasion,” he says,
“she had expressed to me her regret at Flush’s growing plumpness, and
I suppose I must have been cruel enough to suggest starvation as a
remedy, for her next letter opens with an indignant protest:
“Starve Flush! Starve Flush! My dear Mr. Westwood, what are you
thinking of?... He is fat, certainly--but he has been fatter ... and
he may, therefore, become thinner. And then he does not eat after the
manner of dogs. I never saw a dog with such a lady-like appetite. To
eat two small biscuits in succession is generally more than he is
inclined to do. When he has meat it is only once a day, and it must
be so particularly well cut up and offered to him on a fork, and he
is so subtly discriminative as to differences between boiled mutton
and roast mutton, and roast chicken and boiled chicken, that often he
walks away in disdain, and will have none of it....
“My nearest approach to starving Flush is to give general instructions
to the servant who helps him to his dinner, ‘not to press him to eat.’
I know he ought not to be fat--I know it too well--and his father
being, according to Miss Mitford’s account, ‘square,’ at this moment,
there is an hereditary reason for fear. So he is not to be ‘pressed.’”
Flush left England with his mistress after her marriage, and lived to
a good old age in her Italian home. His doggish heart was never torn
by seeing younger, more agile pets preferred to himself. Secure in the
only affection he valued, he passed quietly out of life; and nothing
now remains of his mortality save a lock of hair, which was treasured
by Robert Browning.
One word more of Miss Mitford. Her chief favorite was the greyhound
Mossy, who died in 1819. She wrote an account of his death which no
one ever saw until it was found, after her own death, sealed in an
envelope, together with some of his hair. It repeats the well-known
burden of the faithful lamenting the faithful: “No human being was ever
so faithful, so gentle, so generous, and so fond. I shall never love
anything half so well.”
Robert Browning declared himself a partisan of cats and owls--tastes
which have suggested different gifts from friends. An owl inkstand on
his desk seemed to be brooding over the thoughts whisked out of it by
Browning’s pen; an owl paper-weight steadied these same thoughts when
transferred to paper. Stuffed owls, pictured owls, looked down upon him
as he wrote. With regard to cats, who have much secret affinity with
owls, his opinions were equally liberal, and he notes with the eye of
an artist their wonderful grace and beauty.
A friend of the Brownings in Florence, Miss Isa Blagden, had many pets
of her own, charitably gathered from the ranks of the distressed. She
is probably best known to American readers by her poem to Bushie, the
favorite dog of Charlotte Cushman.
[Illustration: BUSHIE, THE FAVORITE DOG OF CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN.]
Sensitive, nervous and loving was Bushie, her greatest pleasure being
the society of her mistress, her greatest grievance being left at
home when the family went out riding. In this case Bushie’s grief was
hysterical, and required careful soothing ere it abated.
After giving, in her fourteen years of life, “the minimum of trouble
and the maximum of pleasure,” Bushie died in Rome, in 1867, and was
buried in the garden of Miss Cushman’s house. On the broken column
which marked the spot were cut the words:
BUSHIE, COMES FIDELLISSIMA.
If further epitaph be needed, this verse from Miss Blagden’s poem will
suffice:
“From all our lives some faith, some trust,
With thy dear life is o’er;
A lifelong love lies in thy dust:
Can human grave hide more?”
Landor and his dogs made another well-known group in Florence. Of
Landor, Lowell says that, “there was something of challenge even in the
alertness of his pose, and the head was often thrown back like that of
a boxer who awaits a blow.” This fine, defiant old head was often seen
lovingly bent towards Parigi, Pomero, and Giallo--dogs of pedigree and
sense, who cheered his solitude, or adorned his social hours.
Pomero, a Pomeranian, with feathery white hair and bright eyes, lived
in England with Landor, in the town of Bath. All knew him there, and
saluted him, while he in return barked sociably to all. “Not for a
million of money would I sell him,” cried Landor. “A million would not
make me at all happier, and the loss of Pomero would make me miserable
for life.”
This loss nevertheless soon came. “Seven years,” wrote his master, “we
lived together, in more than amity. He loved me to his heart--and what
a heart it was! Mine beats audibly while I write about him.” Over his
“blameless dust” was inscribed this epitaph, so tender and sweet in its
Latin, that translation seems a wrong:
“O urna! nunquam sis tuo ernta portuls:
Cor intus est fidele, nam cor est canis.
Vale, portule! ætemumque, Pomero! vale.
Sed, sidatur, nostri memor.”
Giallo, also a Pomeranian, was a gift from the sculptor Story. He
became a great favorite with his master, who would often talk doggerel
to please him, and maintained that he was the best critic in Italy.
“Giallo and I think” so and so, he would often say; or, “I think so,
and Giallo quite agrees.” That he was quite fit for heaven, was another
belief with his master. Who knows? Perhaps he was!
Victor Hugo’s happy family comprised both cats and dogs. There was
Chougna, the watch-dog, and Sénat, the greyhound, whose collar bore the
inscription: “I wish some one would take me home. Who is my master?
Hugo. What’s my name? Sénat.” There were the Angora kittens, Gavroche
I. and Gavroche II., and Mouche, the great black-and-white cat; the
latter, according to an intimate friend, was “_silencieuse, défiante,
ténébreuse, sinistre_--the cat of the prison, and of exile”--attributes
confirmed by her portrait.
[Illustration: MOUCHE, VICTOR HUGO’S CAT.]
From sheer force of contrast, both Mouche and Hugo must have
enjoyed--had they known him--General Muff, the stately and affable
favorite of an American authoress (Miss Mary L. Booth). I called upon
this lady one day to request of her an introduction to the General;
but he took matters into his own paws, as it were, and introduced
himself before she could appear. Exquisitely dignified and urbane, his
composure was not ruffled by the very wildest gambols of a Persian
kitten, who darted, glanced and flashed hither and thither in the room
like flame.
He wore the famous Fayal collar in which he was photographed. He wore
it because of artistic preference, I suppose--certainly not because he
had nothing else to wear; for I saw in his own particular wardrobe
collars of all kinds and colors, from dainty ribbon to Russia leather.
May it be long before Muff’s gracious personality requires an epitaph!
but when that time comes, the following lines will apply to him as
fitly as to the one for whom they were written--the poet Whittier’s
cat, Bathsheba:
“Whereat
None said ‘Scat!’
Better cat
Never sat
On a mat,
Or caught a rat,
Than this cat.
Requiescat!”
[Illustration: GENERAL MUFF, MISS MARY L. BOOTH’S CAT.]
All who are familiar with the poem by Matthew Arnold, on Geist’s Grave,
or another, on Kaiser, Dead, know the story, told as he alone could
tell it, of this great author’s pets.
The dachshund Geist lived four brief years, then “humbly laid” him
“down to die.” Dearly loved, remembered always--often and often would
his friends recall his “liquid, melancholy eye,” his wistful face at
the window, the scuffle of his feet upon the stair, and his “small,
black figure on the snow.” But “there is no photograph of poor little
Geist,” says Mr. Arnold, “except one taken after his death, which gives
pleasure to us, but could give it to no one else. There is, however,
an excellent portrait of another dog of mine, Max, in a birthday book
from my poems, but it is weighted by a very bad portrait of his master.”
This was the Max of the poem, who “with downcast, reverent head” had
looked upon “Kaiser, dead”--“Kaiser,” once the blithest, happiest of
dogs, supposed at first to be pure dachshund, until at length with--
“The collie hair, the collie swing,
The tail’s indomitable ring,
The eye’s unrest--
The case was clear; a mongrel thing
‘Kai’ stood confest.”
All the same--
“Thine eye was bright, thy coat it shone;
Thou hadst thine errands off and on;
In joy thine last morn flew; anon,
A fit! All’s over;
And thou art gone where Geist hath gone,
And Toss and Rover.”
It is the fashion of mortality to pass away--but that does not alter
the sadness of it--of losing what we love. As surely as we have friends
or pets, so surely shall we know the pain of loss--fortunate only
if there has been between us such true love that the memory thereof
abides. Such love there was between Mr. Edmund Yates and Nelly, the
story of whose life he told me in the following letter of September,
1887:
“Your letter finds me mourning the loss of the one pet animal of my
life. In the year 1878, having taken a country place, and being in want
of an animal as companion, I went to the Dogs’ Home at Battersea,
and on visiting the kennels, was at once struck with the piteous and
earnest expression on the face of a female collie, looking up, with
many others, through the wire netting; an expression which said, as
plainly as possible, ‘Take me out of this, for Heaven’s sake, and
I will be loving and true.’ I could learn nothing of her previous
history, but I paid a sovereign for her, and took her away with me in a
cab; and from that hour to the day of her death, just two months ago,
Nelly, as I called her, was the light of my household, and won the
admiration and love of all who saw her.
[Illustration: NELLY, THE DOG OF EDMUND YATES.]
“Under kind treatment she developed into a very handsome dog, never
large, but wonderfully graceful, leaping and bounding like a deer.
Her back was a reddish-brown, her chest and paws beautifully white;
she looked bright and intelligent, and her eyes had a certain wistful
expression, which is well reproduced in the accompanying photograph.
She was not particularly clever. She seemed to say, like one of
Tennyson’s heroines:
“‘I cannot understand, I love.’
“She was always with me, and in places which I frequent, she was
thoroughly well-known; she lay opposite me in the carriage, on the deck
of my steam-launch, with her nose up in the air, sniffing the fresh
breeze to windward. (‘See the kind-eyed old collie; on the deck, in the
sunshine, she loves to recline,’ sang my friend Ashby-Sterry of her in
one of his pretty Lazy Minstrel Lays.)
“She followed me in my long rides on horseback, over down and through
wood, ranging far away on her own business, but ever and anon coming
back to see how I was getting on. She lay at my feet in my library,
and slept on a couch at the bottom of my bed. About eighteen months
before her death, she developed signs of failing sight, and gradually
grew totally blind. This blindness was the cause of an accident on
which I do not care to dwell, but which necessitated her destruction;
and on the twenty-seventh of July she passed away without a pang. She
lies buried in the garden here, at the foot of a flag-staff, and on her
prettily turfed grave is the following inscription:
HERE LIES
NELLY
A COLLIE DOG;
FOR NINE YEARS A MUCH LOVED FRIEND,
GENTLE, AFFECTIONATE, AND TRUE.
DIED JULY 27TH, 1887.
E. Y., L. K. Y., A. M. B., W. W.
“This is the history of Nelly, whose memory is so dear to me that I
will never have another pet.”
_Vorbei! vorbei_--past and gone!--says Andersen in telling the
fir-tree’s story. It is also _vorbei!_ with these pets--with Mouche and
Dash and Kaiser, with Geist and Nelly and Flush.
_IV._
“_THE UPPER TEN._”
IV.
“THE UPPER TEN.”
Biography is so genial nowadays, and full of easy gossip, that we
cannot help wondering a little at her former stiffness. Nothing is
below her notice now, but the personalia of earlier times slip into her
pages more by accident than design. This, no doubt, is the reason why
she referred so seldom or so briefly to the pet animals of royalty.
There was a divinity in monarchs then, and she treated them with such
ceremonious respect that if we had only her account to look to, we
should know but little of their real selves.
Fortunately for us, letters have been written in every age, and
countless private journals. From these sources come the anecdotes, the
jests, the bits of gossip which recall the past more vividly, and make
these old rulers seem life-like even yet. In this way many a simple,
natural trait has been preserved to relieve the court background of
formality and grandeur; many a little incident is told that proves our
common blood. Kings and queens loved and hoped, or grieved and feared,
even as ourselves who wear no crowns; and while the soft afterglow of
years falls on royalty surrounded by its pets, we realize anew how one
touch of nature can make the whole world kin.
About the beginning of the seventeenth century, there might have
been seen in India at the magnificent court of Jehangir, a favorite
of unusual intelligence and size, whose story has come down to us in
memoirs written by the Emperor himself. It reads like a page from the
Arabian Nights.
“Among my brother’s elephants,” he says, “was one of which I could
not but express the highest admiration, and to which I gave the name
of Indraging (the elephant of India). It was of a size I never beheld
before--such as to get upon his back required a ladder of fourteen
steps. It was of a disposition so gentle and tractable that under the
most furious incitements, if an infant then unwarily threw itself in
its way, it would lay hold of it with its trunk, and place it out of
danger with the utmost tenderness and care. The animal was at the same
time of such unparalleled speed and activity that the fleetest horse
was not able to keep up with it; and such was its courage that it would
attack with perfect readiness a hundred of the fiercest of its kind.