"THE BOOK OF DOGS."*

"WHILE this collection was being made," writes Mr. Leonard in his introduction, "a well-known author and critic took occasion to gently ridicule anthologies and anthologists. He suggested, as if the force of foolishness could no further go, that the next anthology published would deal with dogs." Undeterred by chaff striking so dangerously near home, the present anthologist—we rather thank thee, Mr. Leonard, for so sonorous a word—persevered in anthologising amongst his favourite tribe, and put together the doggy bouquet before us for the benefit, as he says, of the great dog-loving public of the country. We are a little late, through accident, in noticing his book. No reader of the Spectator, we are sure, will accuse us of indifference to The Great Family— if we may Americanise, in big initials, upon so High a Subject—whose doings it commemorates. We have before our eyes now a small terrier, who, we are sure, knows what we are doing. We are more his property than he ours. He leaves us when he chooses—to preside, probably, over a secret canine society collected from a rather dangerous neighbourhood—and returns much at his will. Our whistle follows him, rather than he our whistle. If he meets us on our walks abroad, he wags his tail in kindly acknowledg- ment rather than in any recognition of authority. Growing a little *tired of us once, he attached himself to two ladies at a railway.atation, got into the train, and accompanied them to their home some distance off. His collar betrayed him; and on being notified, we sent our own conveyance for him, to bring him back in state. We feel sure that, had he been consulted, he would have given valuable assistance in the compilation before us, knowing, we suspect, more dog- verse—doggerel by no means—than we ourselves do, even what may have been written by the dog-poets themselves.

Two harvesters in the field have preceded Mr. Leonard,—Mr. G. R. Jesse and Miss Power Cobbe. But the researches of the former were in prose, while Miss Cobbe used the "Friend of Mau, and his friends the Poets," rather as a means to attack viviseotion than anything else, so that our editor regards himself as the dog's first laureate, and for his intro- ductory extract goes back as far as the Book of Tobit. Tobit said, "Go thou with this man, and God, which dwelleth iii heaven, prosper your journey, and the angel of God keep you company. So they went forth both, and the young man's dog with them."

Mr. Leonard has done his best to make his book popular and attractive by including the translations of standard poets from dead languages, by omitting passages, and by modern- ising spelling where necessary ; and the result is certainly remarkable for its variety and inclusiveness. Serious and humorous, patriotic and absurd, bards of all sorts and sizes have been laid under contribution, and the student of the subject will find his reward in gathering dog-roses of all

s _

* The Dog in BMA Po.try. Edited by R. Maynard Leonard. London : David Nutt. 1893. kinds from the collector's garden, which be will perhaps appreciate the more if be reads very little at a time, For tne fault of the volume is the fault of all such collections. It is too much on one string to be played on for a long time'

together. As in the collections of pictures by one artist, too. much of the same diet palls. Doggie himself might grow rather tired of such consecutive adulation, And even as

we write a persistent terrier, a few garden-plots off, is discharging a series of steady and minute gun-like yaps, as who should say,—" Something too much of this. It is

well for a time, but don't keep it up too long." Perhaps, if he takes severally the four parts into which the work is divided—the narrative, the sporting, the elegiac, and the mis- cellaneous—the most determined oynophilist will have enough to assimilate. The "cynic," in the editor's, parlance, evi- dently means the dog's enemy, if, indeed, the animal have any. Breathes there the man, with soul so dead P It is curious, however, to find that among the list of singers under contribution which furnishes the table of contents (for Mr. Leonard has wisely provided both an alphabetic list of authors and a similar one of first lines, an example which might be more generally followed) hardly a great name is absent from the list. Chaucer and Gay, Pope, Goldsmith and Cowper, Crabbe, Burns, Rogers, Wordsworth, Scott, Byron, Southey, Shakespeare, the Brownings, Tennyson, Addison, Matthew Arnold, have all at one time or another been tempted into rhyme by this all-engrossing theme ; and the different minds of the different men all seem to speak to us in many varied keys, which set us thinking of them as much as of their subject. Five specimens of Shakespeare invite us first, by right divine of all he ever touches. And here, too, we note with satisfaction that the editor makes our task easier by grouping together each poet's contributions in. one place :—

"My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, So flowed, so sanded, and their beads are hung With ears that sweep away the morning dew ; Crook-kneed, and dew-lapped like Thessalian bulls. Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells, Each under each. A cry more tuneable Was never hollaed to, nor cheered with horn, In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly."

Music of music! In its rich ring nothing beats this in the volume; and we only regret that the nature of the book pre- vents the appearance of Shakespeare's two stage-dogs, who played their parts with the others, as his best tribute to their qualities,—Launco's delightful little possession, and the "This dog, my dog," of Pyramus and Thisbe. The present writer once saw the latter part performed by an animal who got by far the best applause of the day. He was a little terrier who in private life belonged to the actor who played Pyrarnua, and came on with him at a matinee. He looked at the audience and wagged his tail. Then he turned to his master and watched him as he declaimed the famous fustian with due exaggeration. His opinion was soon formed,—that that master was making a fool of himself. He yapped once shortly and contemptuously, turned his back on him, and faced the audience again in a sitting posture, which he retained. The contempt was perfect. But stage-dogs should have a volume to themselves. One very fine fellow was wont to come on the stage with his mistress during a very long run. He grew so.

accustomed to his work that he missed it like an unemployed player when the play was withdrawn, and after a vain period of restlessness be pined and died. Mr. Irving is credited with the possession of a shrewd beast that knows all his master's characters, and what be is going to play, when he begins to dress. Some be watches from the wing, others he abandons at particular points which offend him ; some, like _Hamlet for instance, nothing will induce him to "sit out" at all, He stays in the dressing-room, under the sofa.

But this is the worst of dogs. They set one aneodotising* at once, and take us away from Mr. Leonard and his collection into a reflective kind of world of our own. As the friend of man, he appears from this anthology to owe the position rather to the latter-day bards, having very muoh risen in their hands in the evolutionary order of civilisation. The speculations upon his possible immortality seem mainly of a later date, beginning with the uncultured Indian, who has pointed so many mystic morals upon the order of Creation. Sir Edwin Arnold is perhaps his most pronounced advocate in that direction, while from the proletarian point of view

Mr. Sims enters by way of contrast ; though the former goes back to Xenophanes for the origin of—

"A man's soul verily Is lodged in that same crawling beast—I know him by the cry."

Here, as in other matters, later times seem to approximate to the classics in many odd forms of speculation. The long middle period was more businesslike. There is very little romance in Julitina Berner's views of a greyhound :— "A greyhound should be headed like a Snake,

And necked like a Drake, Footed like a Cat, Tailed like a Rat, Sided like a Team, Chined like a Beam.

The first year he must learn to feed. The second year to field him lead. The third year he is fellow-like, The fourth year there is none like, The fifth year he is good enough, The sixth year he shall hold the plough. The seventh year he will avail Great bitches for to assail, The eighth year lick ladle, The ninth year cart saddle, And when he is cornea to that year, Have him to the tanner, For the best hound that ever bitch bad At nine year he is full bad."

Even more plain-spoken, and suggestive of a Sabbatarian County Councillor in the olden time, is Crawley's denuncia- tion of the evil-doers who spend their rare pennies upon Sunday bear-baiting, as incurring a divine curse as the certain penalty. As- " A great mastiff dog, and a foul ugly bear," is the only line in the sermon which refers to the canine race at all, it is perhaps rather hard upon Doggie to include it.

By-the-bye, how much the language requires some dog-equi- valent for Reynard or Greymalkin. More satirical still is good old Drayton, who condemns sport generally, especially coursing, as a resource of a "vacant mind," and aims his shafts at the man and the animal equally, finishing with the picture of a hare too much out of breath to stand, and grey- hounds too much out of breath to take her, Compare with this view the triumphant imam of Somerville, the sporting bard of the collection, and we shall see that as with lesser men, so also with the poets,—Quot sates tot sententix.

Where all is quotation, it were wasting our readers' patience to quote much further. But we are tempted to place side by side, as in the book, four apt examples from four modern writers, one great and the others variously distinguished, showing how the same vein of thought runs through them all. Humorous and characteristic is Matthew Arnold's elegy on Kaiser,' the reputed " dachshound true," who turned out a deceiver "Soon, soon the days conviction bring The collie hair, the oollie swing, The tail's indomitable ring,

The eye's unrest : The case was clear—a mongrel thing Kai stood confest."

But what of that "Thine eye was bright, thy coat it shone, Thou had'st thine errands, off and on ; In joy thy last morn flew; anon A tit! All's over ;

And thou art gone where Geist bath gone, And Toss, and Rover."

Perhaps the others are too long to quote at length; but Mortimer Collins is characteristically lyric over his puppy, and George Meredith characteristically involved over his &ohs. Dear Tony,' the puppy,— " His grave is under a tall young lime,

In whose boughs the pale-green hop-flowers climb ; But his spirit—where does his spirit rest P

It was God who made him. God knows best." ' Whereas,—

" Our Islet out of Heligoland, dismissed From his quaint tenement, quite hates and loves. There lived with us a wagging humorist In that hound's arch dwarf-legged on boxing gloves."

The fourth upon our list is a humorist of another kind, better known as the novelist, James Payn, who finishes up his 'Jock' with,— " Our old friend's dead ; but we all well know He's gone to the kennels, where the good dogs go,— Where the cooks be not, but the beef bones be, And his old head never need turn for a flea." The "kennels where the good dogs go," seems to us quite happy in its classic touch, and raise 'Jock' into one of our favourite heroes in the whole of the rhymer's pack before us ; though that most dangerous of all competitors, whom the schoolboy described as the fertile poet Anon, perhaps tops the list with our very old friend Mother Hubbard's famous performer, whose doings are here set out with a fullness that is new to us, but will give quite a fresh start to the interest Mr. Leonard's clients will take in him. Nor will they fail to renew their acquaintance with Pope's epigram :— "I am his Highness' dog at Kew,

Pray toll me, Sir, whose dog are you P "

—or to be perhaps surprised by Swift's evident anticipation of it,— "Pray steal me not : I'm Mr. Dingley's.

Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies."

It is a pleasant book to turn over; and our readers may think that we have found it too much so. Mr. Leonard himself must surely be a Pythagorean by this time, and perhaps will allow us to close our article with a brief address to the public in his name and his friends'—after Mother Hubbard :— "The man said= Your servant The dog said= Bow-wow.' "