POETS' PETS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19292, 3 April 1926, Page 6 (Supplement)

POETS' PETS.

Whether Shakespeare ever cherished any animal pet is not evident, yet he has beetf accused of not appreciating sufficiently that most companionable of animals, tho dog. Other poets, however, had their pets, tho dog being first favourite with them. Of Scott's dogs and Cowper's hare, enough has been said and written; but Cowper had other pets besides Puss, Tiny, Bess, and his spaniels, Beau and Marquis. He also owned a cat, " sedate and grave," and a couple of bullfinches, Tom and Dick, and a few pigeons. ' Pope, too, had a dog. In a letter to a friend .he says: "As it is likeness begets affection, so my favourite dog is a little one, and none of the finest shape. He is not much of a spaniel in his fawning, but has .... a dumb, surly sort of kindness that rather shows itself when he thinks me ill-used by others, than when we walk quietly and peaceably by ourselves." When the poet lost his little companion, he at first thought to place a monument over his remains with the inscription, "Os'i'are Bounce," but abandoned the idea, probably thinking of Ben Jonson's epitaph. Byron did worse when he made regret for a lost pet an excuse for libelling his own kind, as when he extolled his beloved Newfoundland, Boatswain, as possessing beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man without his vices. Boatswain was five years old in November, 1808, when his master wrote: "Boatswain is dead. He expired in a state of madness on the 18th, after suffering much, yet retaining all the gentleness of his nature to the last." Byron was unlucky with his pet 3; his bull-mastiff, Nelson, escaping unmuzzled from the house, fastened upon a horse by the throat, and did not let go his hold until he was shot through the head. Death camo as suddenly, though not so deservedly, to Luath, the famous collie of Burns. If he made friends everywhere, as the poet states, he had tho misfortune to make an enemy somewhere, for he was wantonly killed the night before Burns' father diyb In a fine poem the poet laments the loss of his pet ewe, Mailie, which was accidentally strangled. Mrs. Browning sang poetically of her doves, but her pet of pets was a dog with dark-brown body, silver breast, and eyesi of hazel bland, her peerless Flush, of whom his proud mistress wrote:— But of thee it shall be said, This dog watched beside a bed, Day and night unweary; Watched within a curtained room. Where no sunbeam broke the gloom. Round the sick and dreary. Charles Lamb possessed a dog presented to him by his friend Hood, but Dash was so erratic that Lamb passed him over to Patmore, who found him the bestbehaved of his species, as he told Lamb afterwards. But Elia was not tempted to take him back.