It is therefore in his portraiture of the canine race that the
illustrious author has so far excelled all his contemporaries--in fact,
he has given quite a dramatic cast to his dogs," and she repeated, with
an air of triumph--
"And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall,
Hold o'er the dead their carnival;
Gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb,
They were too busy to bark at him!
From a Tartar's skull they had stripped the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull,
As it slipped through their jaws when their edge grew dull;
As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed."
"Now, to enter into the conception of a dog--to embody one's self, as it
were, in the person of a brute--to sympathise in its feelings--to make
its propensities our own--to 'lazily mumble the bones of the dead,' with
our own individual 'white tusks'! Pardon me, madam, but with all due
deference to the genius of a Scott, it is a thing he has not dare to
attempt. Only the finest mind in the universe as capable of taking so
bold a flight. Scott's dogs, madam, are tame, domestic animals--mere
human dogs, if I may say so. Byron's dogs--But let them speak for
themselves!
'The scalps were in the wild dog's maw,
The hair was tangled round his jaw.
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