ONE of the most successful and popular of Sir Edward Landseer’s delineations is the picture, “Dignity and Impudence.” It is even better known and more widely prized than his exquisitely comical sick dog, that is so sorry for itself, while the keeper is examining its paw; and his deeply pathetic “Last Mourner,” in which the shepherd’s dog keeps solitary watch by its master’s coffin.

The noble mastiff lies stately and serene, his vast bulk tempered by his perfect proportions, and by a gait worthy of the king of dogs. His well-opened hazel eyes look with honest straightforwardness full in your face. His huge ears hang down quietly. His jaws are closed and overlapped by his deep jowl. He is the beau-ideal of strength in restraint and repose, as he lies there with one paw, like that of a lion’s cub, hanging idly over the framework of his couch, and the other half-turned inwards, as if he were about to put it on his heart, in token of the true gentleman he is.

From within the same pent-house, where he is freely tolerated as a lively child companion, protrudes the small confident head—bristling with hair, the knowing little ears erect, the tongue half-thrust out at one side, equivalent to being stuck in the cheek—of the briskest, most undaunted of terriers. I suppose it is because we all know many versions—both human and canine—of this pair of friends, that we are so fond of looking at them and admiring their union in diversity.

I can never see “Dignity and Impudence” without thinking of a couple of dogs belonging to friends of mine, and that were said to bear a striking and exact resemblance to the dogs in the picture. I had not the good fortune to know this living “Dignity and Impudence,” though I long looked forward to the pleasure; but I happened to hear a great deal of them, and registered their traits with interest.

Wallace and Dick were north-country dogs, as is evidenced by the name of the first—he would have been Bevis in England. They dwelt within sight of a purple spur of the Grampians, known as the Braes of Angus. Their home was a hospitable farm-house, among fresh breezy uplands, with that element of breadth and freedom which belongs to hill countries, where, side by side with the cultivated fields, lies a wide moor and remnant of ancient forest, and where the ground is broken—and now falls gradually in a sunny slope—now dips abruptly into a shady dell, or den, as we call it in Scotland. The last is a place of spreading beeches, feathery larches, waving birks, and a great wealth of ferns and wild flowers in spring and early summer, and with a never-failing wimpling burn threading its recesses. It is quite distinct from a wild heathery glen. The neighbourhood to which I allude has quaint old mansions, some of which existed in the stirring times when the glens and dens served as passes for “John Hielandman,” rustling in his plaid and kilt, and bristling with his claymore and skene-dhu. He did not bring down cattle—long-horned kylies—like the modern drover, but came, saw, and lifted what “nowt” he fancied on lowland pastures, goading them up among the mountains to the headquarters of the chief and his dhuinnewassels. An ancient town with steep, narrow streets, having a feudal castle on a tree-crowned rock above a brawling river, and the remains of an abbey, is the market town of the district. On the road to this town one has a glimpse from a distance of the silver shield of the German ocean, with a larger town on its brink.

Wallace and Dick could not have been more highly favoured in the matter of locality, though they had been lovers of the picturesque—not the picturesque on a stage scale, but the quality which is large and primitive—and though they had deliberately gratified their Æsthetic tastes by pitching their tents in this region, which is fresh on the hottest summer day, and has a bracing keenness, not a chill sluggishness, in its winter cold.

Wallace came first to the farm-house a tremendous puppy, for the most part generous and docile in his conscious power, but not without elements of savageness and danger in him, if he were suffered to grow up undisciplined.

I have heard his master tell that, when Wallace was a young dog, one winter night he took more than his own share of the hearthrug, on which his master’s solitary chair was also drawn up. The man, desiring more space to move in, gave the dog an unceremonious push, which roused in him such lurking ill-humour as besets us all at times; only Wallace was a mighty brute, unsupplied with the reins of reason and conscience wherewith to check his passions, and furnished on the other hand with the instinct of quick retaliation and fierce, disproportioned revenge. He gave a low growl, like muttered thunder, and made a half-spring at his master, who recognised on the instant that an unexpected crisis had come, which was to settle whether he was to be the master of the beast or the beast was to be his master, and which placed for the moment his very life in danger. Acting on the impulse of self-preservation, rather than on any deliberate design, he snatched up the poker, and dealt the dog a blow which felled him, and left him stunned and motionless. Quick remorse followed the deed, as the assailant asked himself, had he slain his comrade outright on the spot, and that for the merest ebullition of temper? If Wallace had betrayed some traces of the savage, who else had been cruel in unsparing punishment?

But Wallace came to himself almost before his master could make the compunctious reflection, rose and took himself off with lowered crest and submissive head and tail, clearly acknowledging himself beaten, and as clearly evincing the extreme of shame, for having been guilty of provoking the unequal contest. Unlike man, the dog bore no malice for his defeat; it simply called out in him that unswerving loyalty which has no parallel. From that day to the hour of his death, in a ripe old age, Wallace never again disputed his master’s sovereign will, or disobeyed his direct command, but awarded him the most devoted allegiance. The dog’s great strength, his solid sense for a dog, his rare magnanimity, were, from the era of his conquest, laid, together with his fervent attachment, at the feet of his conqueror—for the dog is another St. Christopher.

Under the influence of this absolute submission[A] to his master, rather than from any mere superficial cleverness, such as may be readily found in mere trick-performing dogs, Wallace could be taught a variety of acquirements, and was in the end so accomplished a dog that I fear I cannot call to mind a tithe of his attainments. I believe he could sit up in any attitude or assumption of character, or throw down his body in any required posture, and remain so for a given time. He could mimic swimming at the word of command. He could constitute himself a pony for little children—indeed he was not less than some Shetland ponies—and he would carry them decorously round the room or the garden on his back. He could—and this was probably the hardest task of all—at his master’s bidding, lie down in a meadow where a herd of cattle fed, and permit the whole of the oxen to gather lowing round him, and even to lick him with their rough tongues, without his stirring or offering the smallest resistance.

Wallace was somewhat up in years before Dick came on the scene. He also arrived at the farm-house a puppy, but it was not at first intended that he should remain there. The master of the house had kindly procured Dick with the intention of giving him to a friend when he himself became so enamoured of the little dog’s briskness and pluck, and at the same time so persuaded that these qualities would be wasted in the quiet life of the woman for whom Dick had been originally got, that he substituted another and more suitable dog, and kept the little man for his own portion.

As I have been assured, there never was a blyther, bolder, more irrepressible spirit than that which lodged in the body of the small terrier. Like his friend Wallace, he needed to be tamed, and to the last he could not stand teasing for any length of time without a strong inclination to show his fine white teeth in a way which was not play. The fact was, that on these occasions he got into a white heat of rage, in which he was in danger of ceasing to be master of his actions.

Once, when Dick was a young dog, under some provocation he flew at and slightly bit his mistress, who had no resource but to show him the iniquity of the deed in a manner which, I believe, is effectual when it is possible to practise it. According to strict injunctions as to the conduct required in the circumstances, and in the stern necessity of preventing a repetition of the offence, which might have cost the life of the offender, she caught Dick by the refractory cuff of his neck, carried him to the door of a room into which she could throw him when the time came, and while holding him in the air—which is the great secret of the effectiveness of the punishment, since the culprit feels himself, during the infliction, absolutely powerless in the grasp of the dispenser of justice—cuffed him soundly, and then flung him from her into the open door at hand, closing it quickly after him, and so preventing any possibility of a hostile attack from the dog while still writhing and struggling under his penalty. The result was, that the tender-hearted young mistress withdrew sick from giving the painful lesson she had been imperatively called on to teach. But, as in the case of Wallace, and as in that of the mastiff which Emily BrontË cowed by one box in the ear, the lesson had been learned thoroughly; Dick never again, unless in such an instance of wilful protracted teasing as I have referred to, took to biting his friends.

His affection was as ardent as his temper was quick, and the convulsions of delight, the ecstatic caresses he lavished on members of the family when they returned from a temporary absence, were demonstrations to see rather than to hear of.

Dick is said to have been the most entertaining companion in a walk, always making amusing discoveries, full of the freshest zest and the most unwearied energy. He had a passion for sport, of which I shall have more to say hereafter; but, sport or no sport, he never failed to find objects of interest on his way, and to impart the interest to his fortunate companion.

Like Wallace, Dick could be easily induced to go through a variety of tricks—which, in my opinion, are slightly disparaging to very sensible or bright dogs, seeing that these tricks are purely artificial, entirely distinct from the dog’s natural sagacity and genuine feats, and can be imparted, if proper pains be taken, to far inferior dogs—I mean dogs that have merely the faculty of mimicry, apart from intuition, steadfastness, and a power of love which makes wise. One of Dick’s many tricks was to go through the form of sitting in his own chair at table with the family when they were at meals (though his food was taken elsewhere), and of speaking when he was told—that is, at a certain word and sign, starting off in his own dog language of yelping and whining, till he was requested to be quiet.

From his introduction to the farm as a puppy, Dick entertained an immense admiration—rapidly progressing, in a dog of his frank, confident character, into a trustful, rather encroaching affection—for the veteran Wallace. The mastiff responded by testifying the most amiable indulgence for his liliputian friend. The indulgence proved its own reward, for there was no question that the eager, joyous little dog brought some of its own eagerness and joy into what was becoming the fading, failing life of his mighty ally.

A ludicrous position which the dogs often assumed has been described to me. Wallace had the usual sterlingly honest dog’s aversion to tramps and disreputable characters (in the dog’s eyes). Dick shared this repugnance; but in spite of his constitutional audacity, he was apt to mingle discretion with his valour here. When a particularly ill-looking traveller approached the farm gate, where Wallace and Dick were on sentry, Dick had a custom of nimbly insinuating himself between Wallace’s fore paws and standing upright beneath the arch of the chest without difficulty; from this vantage-ground he would issue his sharp volley of barks as a rattling accompaniment to the bass cannon-like boom of Wallace’s challenge.

When the two dogs lay down to sleep, Dick would take the most manifest advantage of his friend’s neck, or shoulder, or side, nestling himself within or against it, for the promotion of his own warmth and ease, without sustaining the least rebuke from the gentle giant.

Sometimes when Dick wished a game of play, for which Wallace felt himself quite too old, Dick would beset his friend like a little pestering spoiled child, pawing and pulling, and making darts and dabs at Wallace’s ears, which would have nearly covered Dick’s body, or at the jaw, one shake from which would have dismissed the life from the little dog in a twinkling. But Dick was comfortably persuaded that he was entirely privileged, and he did not argue without his host, though Wallace, after much endurance, could assert himself so far as to send off his tormentor. Yet he was never known to do it, save in the kindest, most friendly fashion. No paralysing stroke from his paw, no crushing snap from his teeth, ever scared the fun and familiarity out of little Dick. He received his congÉ in the shape of a mild, if firm refusal, which left him free to come sidling into his crony’s presence again within the next five minutes.

I have mentioned Dick’s love of sport. Wallace had the same love to a marked extent; indeed, it was the one temptation which proved irresistible, and seduced him once and again from his adherence to his master. It was not that the dog openly resisted or defied orders, but that he showed craft in snatching an opportunity to evade them, in slipping off unperceived, and conducting his hunts in an independent style in the preserves and on the great moor at hand—coming home with a dogged fidelity, and yet with the self-convicted air of a culprit, after his lust for the pursuit of prey was satisfied, to the punishment which he was perfectly aware remained in store for him. Of course, for a dog like Wallace to roam abroad unattended, on such an errand, was to expose both him and his master to certain penalties, and every effort was made, for the dog’s own sake as well as for his master’s credit, to break him of so dangerous a propensity. The attempt was not altogether successful. The ruling passion was so strong in Wallace that it rivalled even his conception of duty. But the consequences of his escapades always fell short of the condign punishment at the hands of incensed proprietors which his master dreaded for the dog, and repentance, forgiveness, amendment followed till the next outbreak.

These outbreaks would probably have decreased in number and died out as Wallace’s spirit of enterprise abated with his advancing age;[B] but I am sorry to say Dick proved an artful decoy and subtle tempter. The two dogs did not venture on a forbidden expedition under the very eye of their master; but the moment his back was turned to go from home, I have been assured that the certainty and celerity with which the conspirators detected his absence was something marvellous. Wallace and Dick set off like the wind—or at least as like the wind as the old dog’s lagging limbs would allow—to the nefarious indulgence of their appetite. Nothing short of chaining up Wallace before his master left could prevent the catastrophe. No efforts of his young mistress—of whom, at the same time, he was exceedingly fond, and whose escort and protector he was generally proud to be—were of the least avail to detain him; she has told me how she would run out to intercept the dogs on the first hint of their decamping, and try to hold them back by main force, but Wallace would wrest himself from her grasp, and trot after Dick, already scampering away in the distance.

Sometimes these hunts lasted as long as three or four days. Naturally, the dogs were unwilling to come back to the disgrace which awaited them, and they could subsist in the meantime on the spoil which they caught and slew. The neighbourhood of the great wide moor and fragment of forest—a broad brown and dark green tract stretching, with a suggestion of wonder and mystery, along the whole expanse of cultivated country—rendered it specially difficult to discover the direction the dogs had taken, running as the birds flew, and making nothing of hedges, ditches, and “dykes” in their progress, after they were fairly out of sight. It was the solving of a puzzle to pursue and apprehend them. Sometimes a wayfarer passed and recognised them, and brought the tidings of their whereabouts to “the farm town.” Sometimes the dogs’ master, when he went to the weekly market in the quaint town I have described, received information from a neighbour which enabled him to track the fugitives. Oftenest they returned of their own accord, spent and sated, brought back by some compulsion of law, some tie of dependence and affection, which was in the end too powerful for their desire to rove, so that they could not become wild dogs again, or desert their aggrieved human friends for a permanence.

Knowing the district as I do, I have great sympathy with Wallace and Dick. Had I possessed Wallace’s capacity of endurance, or Dick’s youthful fleetness of foot and length of wind—had I shared their relish for hares and rabbits, torn limb from limb, and their capacity of thriving on the same—I too should have liked to wander for days among these fresh fields, with their yellowing corn or rich pasture, on which sturdy bullocks or skittish colts were having a pleasant time. I could have dived with good-will into these tree-girdled quarries, and roamed along these high roads, ample enough for two coaches-and-six to drive abreast, and bordered with bands of yellow lady’s bedstraw and azure veronica, and later in the season by miniature forests of nodding harebells; or down these rough by-roads, with their patches of yellow broom and trailing garlands of brambles, to the outlying heather on the verge of the moor, about which great humble bees were always humming. My heart would have hankered, like theirs, for that grand, gaunt old moor of Mendrummond—or, as it is called in local parlance, “Munrummon”—with its pale liverwort and white grass of Parnassus, its bronze stemmed firs and stunted oaks, its lone green glades. One can still feel that here, as among the mountains of old Scotland, there linger vestiges of a virgin world.

As a human being and not a dog, I am not at all clear that I should have returned so faithfully to cutting reproaches and a good beating as Wallace and Dick had the courage to do.

The dogs used to display judiciousness in selecting the cover of night for their reappearance, and they sometimes brought home a mutilated hare or rabbit, as if it were intended for a propitiation. But Wallace at least reported himself, in full view of the result, with manly straightforwardness and resignation. He was accustomed to go beneath his master’s window, and by a deep prolonged “bow-f-f” announce that there he was ready to submit to whatever his master imposed on him.

I regret to own that Dick, on the contrary, stole round the house on tiptoe, and, if he found an open window on the ground floor, crept in and hid himself beneath a convenient sofa or bed, in a short-sighted, childish notion that he might evade the righteous sentence he had provoked.

On the last secret hunt in which the dog-friends engaged, Wallace was so enfeebled by age that the exertion exhausted the little strength left to him, and he was unable to return home. Dick had to face the wrath of his master alone, while he was unable to account for his missing comrade.

Happily the mastiff reached a neighbouring farm-house, where he was recognised—for he was a well-known and valued dog—and where he was hospitably entertained, till word could be sent to his master, who despatched a cart for the disabled sportsman. But fancy the mortification of poor Wallace, once so invulnerable at every point, so renowned a warrior and hunter, to be brought home like a dead donkey, stretched at the bottom of a cart!

Wallace survived his last hunt some time, but the evidence of the decay of his powers became always more unmistakeable. He was a mere bony wreck of what he had been. He subsisted principally on great “diets” of milk freely lavished on him to prolong his days. At last he fell into a habit of stealing away and secreting himself in some solitary spot of the garden or grounds, an ominous inclination which superstitious servants called “looking for his grave,” and that was in reality prompted by the curious pathetic instinct which causes every stricken animal to draw away from the herd, and hide itself from its kind.

But Wallace was not to die apart from human hands and the friends he had loved. No one saw him die; but a servant, preparing to sweep out the dining-room early one morning, found the old dog stretched stark and cold on his master’s sofa—“like a Christian,” as she protested, half awed, half scandalised. And what gave the last touch to the situation was that little lively Dick—always fond of establishing himself by his friend—was discovered lying trembling, with that consciousness of death of which a dog is supposed to be unconscious, behind Wallace, that he had not dared to disturb—the first time Wallace had frightened Dick.

I think Wallace’s master, by his own choice, helped to dig the dog’s grave; I know that the spot selected was one which had been long chosen for his last resting-place. Care was taken that Dick should not know the place, or be tempted to disturb it, when it was little thought that the terrier would soon lie by his comrade’s side. Not that Dick died of his mourning; I never heard of a dog pining to death for a fellow-dog—only for his master. I am not even aware that Dick gave great signs of missing his companion after the first few days, for dogs will be dogs after all; and undoubtedly Dick recovered the full flow of his constitutionally high spirits within a short period.

Merry Dick’s death was so much the more tragical that it was not in the course of nature; it was the result of an accident—the product of such carelessness as it is hard to forgive. The offices belonging to Dick’s master’s farm were infested with rats to such an extent that even a terrier was insufficient to keep the vermin down, and poison was employed for their destruction. A portion of strychnine passed into the keeping of a kitchen maid, who was to sprinkle it on bread and butter, to be exposed, with due precaution, near the rats’ holes. The plate of bread and butter, with the fatal powder invisible on it, was left heedlessly on a kitchen table, where it was only by the good providence of God that some man or woman—ignorant of anything unusual in the innocent-looking slices—did not eat what was intended for the rats, and perish by a horrible death.

Only poor Dick was destined to be the victim. Attending on the footsteps of his mistress as usual, he came into the kitchen, and, spying the attractive luncheon, sprang up and seized a half-slice.

“It is the poisoned bread,” cried the rash servant, observing what had happened, and thinking she had done enough when she had given the tardy warning.

Dick’s mistress snatched the perilous morsel from between his teeth and flung it in the fire. So instantaneous was the whole occurrence, that even she—never doubting that she had rescued the dog from all evil consequences—forgot the circumstances in the occupation she was engaged in.

Dick, in his usual excellent health and enjoyment of life, accompanied his mistress in a walk, with all his ordinary pleasure in the privilege. It was not till some hours later, in the bustle of guests assembling for dinner, that Dick’s master suddenly summoned his mistress from her toilet with the grievous news that Dick was dying. The little dog had been discovered rigid in a fit. So entirely was the result of what had taken place in the morning unapprehended, that it was not till various remedies had been tried in vain that Dick’s mistress suddenly recalled the episode of the poisoned bread. A clever young veterinary surgeon who was within reach came and administered antidotes, which poor little Dick, in the intervals between his paroxysms, was induced to take from the mistress who was so bitterly distressed by his fate; but all was of no avail, the dog succumbed speedily to the deadly poison, and died before the dinner guests had met.

So Dick and Wallace rest together, like true comrades, in what was once their pleasant playground.