PETS

My suggestive friend has taken to postcards, and his style, never diffuse, has become as curt as that of Mr. Alfred Jingle. "Why not Pets?" he writes; and the suggestion gives pause.

When Mrs. Topham-Sawyer accepted the invitation to the Little Dinner at Timmins's, she concluded her letter to Rosa Timmins: "With a hundred kisses to your dear little pet." She said pet, we are told, "because she did not know whether Rosa's child was a girl or a boy; and Mrs. Timmins was very much pleased with the kind and gracious nature of the reply to her invitation." My mind misgave me that my friend might be using the word pet in the same sense as Mrs. Topham-Sawyer, and inviting me to a discussion of the CrÊche or the Nursery. As my views of childhood are formed on those of Herod and Solomon, I hastened to decline so unsuitable a task, whereupon my friend, for all reply, sent me the following excerpt from an evening paper:—

"The Westminster Cat Exhibition, which will be held in the Royal Horticultural Society's Hall, Vincent Square, Westminster, on January 10 and 11, will afford an opportunity to all who love the domestic cat to aid in improving its lot through the agency of Our Dumb Friends' League, which it is desired to benefit, not only by their presence on the occasion, but by contributing suitable specimens to the 'Gift Class' which will form part of the show, and be offered for sale in aid of the League during the time the exhibition is open. Children will be invited, for the first time, to enter into the competition with their pets for suitable prizes, and thus, it is hoped, increase their interest in and affection for domestic pets."

Here I felt myself on more familiar ground. For I, too, have been young. I have trafficked in squirrels and guinea-pigs, have invested my all in an Angora rabbit, and have undergone discipline for bringing a dormouse into school. These are, indeed, among the childish things which I put away when I became a Fifth Form boy; but their memory is sweet—sweeter, indeed, than was their actual presence. For the Cat, with which my friend seems chiefly to concern himself, I have never felt, or even professed, any warm regard. I leave her to Dick Whittington and Shakespeare, who did so much to popularize her; to Gray and Matthew Arnold and "C. S. C.," who have drawn her more sinister traits. Gray remarks, with reference to "the pensive Selima" and her hopeless struggles in the tub of goldfish, that "a favourite has no friend." Archbishop Benson rendered the line

"Delicias dominÆ cetera turba fugit."

I join the unfriendly throng, and pass to other themes.

The pet-keeping instinct, strong in infancy but suppressed by the iron traditions of the Public School, not seldom reasserts itself in the freedom of later life. "The Pets of History" would be a worthy theme for a Romanes Lecture at Oxford; and, if the purview were expanded so as to include the Pets of Literature, it would be a fit subject for the brilliant pen of Mr. Frederic Harrison. We might conveniently adopt a Wordsworthian classification, such as "Pets belonging to the period of Childhood," "Juvenile Pets," "Pets and the Affections," "Pets of the Fancy," and "Pets of the Imagination." In the last-named class a prominent place would be assigned to Heavenly Una's milk-white lamb and to Mary's snowy-fleeced follower. "Pets of the Fancy" has, I must confess, something of a pugilistic sound, but it might fairly be held to include the tame eagle which Louis Napoleon, when resident in Carlton Gardens, used to practise in the basement for the part which it was to play in his descent on Boulogne. Under "Pets and the Affections" we should recall Chaucer's "Prioresse"—

"Of smale houndes hadde sche, that sche fedde
With rostud fleissh, and mylk, and wastel bredde."

The Pets of Tradition would begin with St. John's tame partridge, and would include an account of St. Francis preaching to the birds. The Pets of History would no doubt involve some reference to the Bruce's spider and Sir Isaac Newton's Diamond and the Duc D'Enghien's spaniel; and, if so belittling a title as "pet" may be applied to so majestic an animal as the horse, we should trace a long line of equine celebrities from Bucephalus and Sorrel to Marengo and Copenhagen. The Pets of Literature are, of course, a boundless host—chargers like White Surrey, and coursers like Roland; hounds like Keeldar and falcons like Cheviot—to say nothing of Mrs. Merdle's parrot, or Miss Tox's canary, or Mr. Kipling's appalling monkey, who murdered his owner's wife.

Wordsworth alone is responsible for a whole menagerie of pets—for a White Doe, for a greyhound called Dart, for "Prince," "Swallow," and "Little Music," let alone the anonymous dog who was lost with his master on Helvellyn. The gentle Cowper had his disgusting hares and his murderous spaniel Beau. Byron's only friend was a Newfoundland dog called Boatswain. The horses of fiction are a splendid stud. Ruksh leads the procession in poetry, and Rosinante in prose. A true lover of Scott can enumerate twenty different horses, of strongly marked individuality and appropriate names. Whoso knows not Widderin and his gallop from the bushrangers has yet to read one of the most thrilling scenes in fiction; and I think that to this imaginary stud may be fairly added the Arabian mare which Lord Beaconsfield thought he had ridden for thirty miles across country in the strongly-enclosed neighbourhood of Southend.

Among the Pets of Real Life an honourable place belongs to Sir Walter Scott's deerhounds—were not their names Bran and Maida?—and to Lord Shaftesbury's donkey Coster. Loved in life and honoured in death were Matthew Arnold's dachshunds Geist and Max, his retriever Rover, his cat Atossa, and, above all, his canary Matthias, commemorated in one of the most beautiful of elegiac poems. With Bismarck—not, one would have thought, a natural lover of pets—is historically associated a Boarhound, or "Great Dane." Lord Beaconsfield characteristically loved a peacock. The evening of Mr. Gladstone's days was cheered by the companionship of a small black Pomeranian. Sir Henry Hawkins was not better known to the criminal classes than his fox-terrier Jack; and all who passed Lady Burdett-Coutts's house saw hanging in the dining-room window a china cockatoo-the image or simulacrum of a departed bird which lived to a prodigious age and used to ask the most inconvenient questions.

The greatest patroness of Pets in Real Life was Queen Victoria, and her books have secured for these favourites a permanent place. Noble, the collie, will be remembered as long as "Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands" is read; and I can myself recall the excitement which fluttered the highest circles when a black terrier, called, I think, Sharp, killed a rat which had climbed up the ivy into the window of the Queen's sitting-room at Windsor.

There are certain pets, or families of pets, which stand on their own traditional dignity rather than on associations with individuals. All Cheshire knows the Mastiffs of Lyme, tall as donkeys and peaceable as sheep. The Clumber Spaniels and the Gordon Setters are at least as famous as the dukes who own them. Perhaps the most fascinating pet in the canine world is associated with the great victory of Blenheim; and the Willoughby Pug preserves from oblivion a name which has been merged in the Earldom of Ancaster.

In the days of my youth one was constantly hearing—and especially in the Whiggish circles where I was reared—two names which may easily puzzle posterior critics. These were "Bear Ellis" and "Poodle Byng." They were pre-eminently unsentimental persons. "Bear" Ellis (1781-1863) was so called because he was Chairman of the Hudson's Bay Company, and "Poodle" Byng (1784-1871) because his hair, while yet he boasted such an appendage, had been crisply curled. But the Dryasdust of the future, pondering over the social and political records of Queen Victoria's earlier reign, will undoubtedly connect these prefixes with pet-keeping tendencies, and will praise the humane influence of an animal-loving Court which induced hardened men of the world to join the ranks of "Our Dumb Friends' League."