flatter it in very marked degrees. Dogs live with
man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his
notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their favour in this world
of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives; and
their joys may lie outside. I am in despair at our persistent
ignorance. I read in the lives of our companions the same processes of
reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts of the right against the
wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom; I see them with
our weaknesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and with our
one stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet, as
they hurry by me on the street with tail in air, or come singly to
solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is
still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only?
Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments
snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's
mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives?
Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and
the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the
affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless,
also, the masters are, in many cases, the object of a merely
interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Quatorze,[25] giving and
receiving flattery and favour; and the dogs, like the majority of men,
have but forgotten their true existence and become the dupes of their
ambition.

NOTES

This article originally appeared in _The English Illustrated Magazine_
for May 1883, Vol. I, pp. 300-305. It was accompanied with
illustrations by Randolph Caldecott. The essay was later included in
the volume _Memories and Portraits_ (1887).

The astonishing fidelity and devotion of the dog to his master have
certainly been in part repaid by men of letters in all times. A
valuable essay might be written on the Dog's Place in Literature; in
the poetry of the East, hundreds of years before Christ, the dog's
faithfulness was more than once celebrated. One of the most marvellous
passages in Homer's _Odyssey_ is the recognition of the ragged Ulysses
by the noble old dog, who dies of joy. In recent years, since the
publication of Dr. John Brown's _Rab and his Friends_ (1858), the dog
has approached an apotheosis. Among innumerable sketches and stories
with canine heroes may be mentio