] whose soul's shipwreck in the matter
of gallantry I have recounted above, has only twice been known to steal,
and has often nobly conquered the temptation. The eighth is his
favourite commandment. There is something painfully human in these
unequal virtues and mortal frailties of the best. Still more painful is
the bearing of those "stammering professors" in the house of sickness
and under the terror of death. It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow
or other, the dog connects together, or confounds, the uneasiness of
sickness and the consciousness of guilt. To the pains of the body he
often adds the tortures of the conscience; and at these times his
haggard protestations form, in regard to the human deathbed, a dreadful
parody or parallel.

I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the double
etiquette which dogs obey; and that those who were most addicted to the
showy street life among other dogs were less careful in the practice of
home virtues for the tyrant man. But the female dog, that mass of
carneying affectations, shines equally in either sphere; rules her rough
posse of attendant swains with unwearying tact and gusto; and with her
master and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning
point. The attention of man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it
would thus appear) the same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read
the canine heart, they would be found to flatter it in very different
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 an