udently in furnishing him
with a tegument impervious to ordinary stripes. The malice of a child or
a weak hand can make feeble impressions on him. His back offers no mark
to a puny foeman. To a common whip or switch his hide presents an
absolute insensibility. You might as well pretend to scourge a
school-boy with a tough pair of leather breeches on. His jerkin is well
fortified; and therefore the costermongers "between the years 1790 and
1800" did more politicly than piously in lifting up a part of his upper
garment. I well remember that beastly and bloody custom. I have often
longed to see one of those refiners in discipline himself at the cart's
tail, with just such a convenient spot laid bare to the tender mercies
of the whipster. But, since Nature has resumed her rights, it is to be
hoped that this patient creature does not suffer to extremities,--and
that to the savages who still belabor his poor carcass with their blows
(considering the sort of anvil they are laid upon,) he might in some
sort, if he could speak, exclaim, with the philosopher, "Lay on! you
beat but upon the case of Anaxarchus."

Contemplating this natural safeguard, this fortified exterior, it is
with pain I view the sleek, foppish, combed, and curried person of this
animal as he is transmuted and disnaturalized at watering-places, etc.,
where they affect to make a palfrey of him. Fie on all such
sophistications! It will never do, Master Groom! Something of his honest
shaggy exterior will still peep up in spite of you,--his good, rough,
native, pine-apple coating. You cannot "refine a scorpion into a fish,
though you rinse it and scour it with ever so cleanly cookery."[C]

The modern poet quoted by A. B. proceeds to celebrate a virtue for which
no one to this day had been aware that the ass was remarkable:--

"One other gift this beast hath as his owne,
Wherewith the rest could not be furnished;
On man himselfe the same was not bestowne:
To wit, on him is ne'er engendered
The hatefull vermine that doth teare the skin,
And to the bode [body] doth make his passage in."

And truly, when one thinks on the suit of impenetrable armor with which
Nature (like Vulcan to another Achilles) has provided him, these subtle
enemies to _our_ repose would have shown some dexterity in getting into
_his_ quarters. As the bogs of Ireland by tradition expel toads and
reptiles, he may well defy these small deer in his fastnesses. It seems
t