"While various scenes of sportive woe
The infant race employ;
And tortur'd victims bleeding, show
The tyrant in the boy.
"Behold a youth of gentler heart!
To spare the creature's pain,
O take, he cries--take all my tart,
But tears and tart are vain.
"Learn from this fair example, you
Who savage sports delight,
How cruelty disgusts the view,
While pity charms the sight."
[Illustration: FIRST STAGE OF CRUELTY.]
Let us suppose a disciple of Pythagoras to contemplate this print,
how would it affect him? He would imagine it to represent a group
of young barbarians qualifying themselves for executioners; would
raise his voice to Heaven, and thank the God of mercy that he is not
an inhabitant of such a country; would lament that these degenerate
little beings should not have been informed that the animals on
whom they are now inflicting such tortures, might, previous to
transmigration, have been their fathers, brothers, friends.
The delineation of such scenes must shock every feeling heart,
and their enumeration disgust every humane mind. I hope, for the
honour of our nature and our nation, that they are not so frequently
practised as when these prints were published.
The hero of this tragic tale is Tom Nero: by a badge upon his arm,
we know him to be one of the boys of St. Giles' Charity School. The
horrible business in which he is engaged was, I hope and believe,
never realized in this or any other country. The thought is taken
from Callot's "Temptation of St. Anthony." A youth of superior rank,
shocked at such cruelty, offers his tart to redeem the dog from
torture. This Hogarth intended for the portrait of an illustrious
personage, then about thirteen years of age; the compliment was
rather coarse, but well intended. A lad chalking on a wall the
suspended figure, inscribed TOM NERO, prepares us for the future fate
of this young tyrant, and shows by anticipation the reward of cruelty.
Throwing at cocks might possibly have its origin in what some of our
sagacious politicians call a natural enmity to France, which is thus
_humanely_ exercised against the allegorical symbol of that nation.
A boy tying a bone to the tail of his dog, while the kind-hearted
animal licks his hand, must have a most diabolical disposition.[29]
Two little imps are burning out the eyes of a bird with a
knitting-needle. A group of embryotic Domitians, who have tied two
cats to the extremities of a rope and hung it over a lamp-iron, to
see how _delightfully_ they will tear each other, are marked with
grim delight. The link-boy is absolutely a Lilliputian fiend. The
fellow encouraging a dog to worry a cat, and two animals of the same
species thrown out of a garret window with bladders fastened to them,
completes this mortifying prospect of youthful depravity.