ANIMAL MEMORIALS AND MEMENTOES.
Commenting on the honour paid by the Athenians to a dog that followed his master across the sea to Salamis, Pope says: ‘This respect to a dog in the most polite people of the world is very observable. A modern instance of gratitude to a dog, though we have but few such, is, that the chief Order of Denmark—now called the Order of the Elephant—was instituted in memory of the fidelity of a dog named Wild-brat to one of their kings, who had been deserted by his subjects. He gave his Order this motto, or to this effect (which still remains): “Wild-brat was faithful.”’
Had Pope been writing half-a-dozen years later, he need not have gone to Denmark for a modern instance of gratitude to a dog. Mr Robert—afterwards Viscount—Molesworth being prevented entering an outhouse by his favourite greyhound pulling him away by his coat lappet, ordered a footman to examine the place. On opening the door, the man was shot dead by a hidden robber. The faithful hound afterwards died in London, and his master sent his body to Yorkshire, to be inurned in Edglington Wood, near Doncaster; the receptacle of his remains bearing an inscription in Latin, which has been thus translated: ‘Stay, traveller! Nor wonder that a lamented Dog is thus interred with funeral honour. But, ah! what a Dog! His beautiful form and snow-white colour; pleasing manners and sportive playfulness; his affection, obedience, and fidelity, made him the delight of his master, to whom he closely adhered with his eager companions of the chase, delighted in attending him. Whenever the mind of his lord was depressed, he would assume fresh spirit and animation. A master, not ungrateful for his merits, has here, in tears, deposited his remains in this marble urn.—M. F. C. 1714.’
An Italian greyhound, buried in Earl Temple’s garden at Stowe, had never saved his master’s life, but was nevertheless held worthy of a memorial stone, bearing the eulogistic epitaph from the pen of Arbuthnot:
‘To the Memory of Signor Fido—An Italian of good extraction, who came to England not to bite us, like most of his countrymen, but to gain an honest livelihood. He hunted not for fame, yet acquired it; regardless of the praises of his friends, but most sensible of their love. Though he lived among the Great, he neither learned nor flattered any vice. He was no bigot, though he doubted of none of the Thirty-nine Articles. And if to follow Nature and to respect the laws of Society be philosophical, he was a perfect philosopher, a faithful friend, an agreeable companion, a loving husband, distinguished by a numerous offspring, all which he lived to see take good courses. In his old age, he retired to the home of a clergyman in the country, where he finished his earthly race, and died an honour and an example to his species. Reader—This stone is guiltless of flattery, for he to whom it is inscribed was not a Man, but a Greyhound.’
That eulogy is more than could honestly be said of the animal whose monument proclaims:
Here lies the body of my dear retriever;
Of his master alone he was ne’er a deceiver;
But the Game-laws he hated, and poached out of bounds—
His spirit now ranges the glad hunting-grounds.
Not in company, we should say, with that of the blameless creature commemorated by the couplet:
Beneath this stone, there lies at rest
Bandy, of all good dogs the best.
Among the sojourners at the Grand Hôtel Victoria, Mentone, in the year 1872, was the Archduchess Marie Régnier, who, during her three months’ stay there, took such a liking to mine host’s handsome dog Pietrino, that she begged him of M. Milandi, and carried her prize with her to Vienna. In less than a fortnight after reaching that capital, Pietrino was back in his old quarters again, having travelled eight hundred miles across strange countries, over mountains, through towns and villages, only to die at his master’s feet five days after his coming home. He was buried among the rose-bushes in the grounds so familiar to him, his resting place marked by a marble column, inscribed, ‘Ci-gît Pietrino, Ami Fidèle. 1872.’
Exactly a hundred years before that, a dog died at Minorca out of sheer grief for the loss of his master, who, ordered home to England, did not care to encumber himself with his canine friend. Honouring the deserted animal’s unworthily placed affection, his owner’s brother-officers saw him decently interred, and erected a stone to his memory, bearing an epitaph written by Lieutenant Erskine, ending:
His life was shortened by no slothful ease,
Vice-begot care, or folly-bred disease.
Forsook by him he valued more than life,
His generous nature sank beneath the strife.
Left by his master on a foreign shore,
New masters offered—but he owned no more;
The ocean oft with seeming sorrow eyed,
And pierced by man’s ingratitude, he died.
Of tougher constitution was a small Scotch terrier that, in 1868, followed his master’s coffin to the churchyard of Old Greyfriars, Edinburgh, heedless of the notice forbidding entrance to dogs. The morning after the funeral, Bobby was found lying on the newly-made mound. He was turned out of the churchyard; but the next morning saw him upon the grave, and the next and the next. Taking pity upon the forlorn little creature, the custodian of the burial-ground gave him some food. From that time, Bobby considered himself privileged, and was constantly in and about the churchyard, only leaving it at mid-day to obtain a meal at the expense of a kind-hearted restaurant keeper; but every night was passed upon the spot holding all he had once held dear. Many were the attempts to get him to transfer his allegiance from the dead to the living; but none availed. As long as his life lasted, and it lasted four years, Bobby stayed by, or in the immediate neighbourhood of, his master’s grave. Such fidelity, unexampled even in his faithful race, deserved to be kept in remembrance; and thanks to the most munificent of Lady Bountifuls, his memory is kept green by his counterfeit presentment on a drinking-fountain of Peterhead granite erected on George the Fourth Bridge, as a ‘tribute to the affectionate fidelity of Greyfriars Bobby. In 1868, the faithful dog followed the remains of his master to Greyfriars Churchyard, and lingered near the spot until his death in 1872.’
London is not without its memorials to dogs. On the wall leading to the Irongate Stairs, near the Tower, may be read: ‘In Memory of Egypt, a favourite dog belonging to the Irongate Watermen, killed on the 4th August 1841, aged 16.
Here lies interred, beneath this spot,
A faithful dog, who should not be forgot.
Full fifteen years he watched here with care,
Contented with hard bed and harder fare.
Around the Tower he daily used to roam
In search of bits so savoury, or a bone.
A military pet he was, and in the Dock,
His rounds he always went at twelve o’clock;
Supplied with cash, which held between his jaws—
The reason’s plain—he had no hands but paws—
He’d trot o’er Tower Hill to a favourite shop,
There eat his meal and down his money drop.
To club he went on each successive night,
Where, dressed in jacket gay, he took his pipe;
With spectacles on nose he played his tricks,
And pawed the paper, not the politics.
Going his usual round, near Traitors’ Gate,
Infirm and almost blind, he met his fate;
By ruthless kick hurled from the wharf, below
The stones on which the gentle Thames does flow,
Mortally injured, soon resigned his breath,
Thus left his friends, who here record his death.’
A tablet placed near the north-east end of the platform of the Edgware Road Railway Station, is inscribed:
In Memory of
Poor Fan,
Died May 8, 1876.
For ten years at the Drivers’ call.
Fed by many,
Regretted by all.
Poor Fan lies under an evergreen hard by. She was notable for travelling continually on a railway engine between the Edgware Road and Hammersmith; occasionally getting off at an intermediate station, crossing the line, and returning by the next train; never taking any train but a Hammersmith train when outward bound, or going farther east than her own particular station when journeying homewards.
An Englishman travelling in France in 1698, was disgusted at seeing, in a ducal garden, a superb memorial in the shape of a black marble cat couching on a gilded white marble cushion, on the top of a black marble pedestal bearing the one word ‘Menine.’ Such posthumous honour is rarely paid to puss; but two other instances of it may be cited. In making excavations near the Place de la Bastille, in the ground formerly occupied by the gardens of the Hôtel de Lesdiguières, the workmen brought to light the handsome tomb of a cat which had belonged to Françoise-Marguerite de Gondy, widow of Emmanuel de Crequi, Duke of Lesdiguières. It bore no laudatory epitaph, but the odd quatrain:
Cy-gist une chatte jolie.
Sa maitresse, qui n’aima rien,
L’aima jusqu’à la folie.
Pourquoi le dire? On le voit bien.
Or to put it into English: ‘Here lies a handsome cat. Her mistress, who loved nothing, loved her out of caprice. Why say so? All the world knew it well.’
‘Grandfather,’ a feline Nestor, belonging to a lady in Scotland, was something more than handsome. When he had passed his twenty-first year, he could climb a tree, catch a bird, hunt a mouse, or kill a rat, as cleverly as in his younger days; and when he died, at the age of twenty-two, had well earned himself a memorial stone and an epitaph. Both were accorded him, the last-named running thus:
‘Life to the last enjoyed,’ here Pussy lies,
Renowned for mousing and for catching flies;
Loving o’er grass and pliant branch to roam,
Yet ever constant to the smiles of home.
. . . . .
The Preux Chevalier of the race of Cats,
He has outlived their customary span,
As Jenkins and Old Parr had that of Man;
And might on tiles have murmured in moonshine
Nestorian tales of youth and Troy divine;
Of rivals fought; of kitten-martyrdoms;
While, meekly listening, round sat Tabs and Toms.
But with the modesty of genuine worth,
He vaunted not his deeds of ancient birth;
His whiskers twitched not, at the world’s applause,
He only yawned, and licked his reverend paws;
Curled round his head his tail, and fell asleep,
Lapped in sweet dreams, and left us here to weep.
Yet pleased to know, that ere he sank to rest,
As far as mortal cats are, he was blest.
The horse, even though he may have won a fortune for his master, as a rule goes literally to the dogs at last. Some few of the wonders of the turf have escaped that indignity. A plain stone inscribed simply ‘Sir Peter,’ tells visitors to Knowsley, Sir Peter Teazle lies beneath it. A sculptured stone, rifled from a cardinal’s monument, overlooks the grave of Emilius at Easby Abbey. A cedar, planted by a once famous jockey, rises hard by the resting-place of Bay-Middleton and Crucifix; Kingston reposes under the shade of a grand oak at Eltham; Blair-Athol, the pride of Malton, lies embowered at Cobham; and green is the grave of Amato, well within hail of the course he traversed triumphantly. The skeleton of Eclipse is still, we believe, on view at Cannons, but it must be minus at least one hoof, since King William IV. gave a piece of plate, with a hoof of Eclipse set in gold, to be run for at Ascot in 1832; the trophy being carried off by Lord Chesterfield’s Priam. Equine mementoes usually take this form, and many a sideboard can show the polished hoof of a famous racehorse. The Prince of Wales is said to possess a hoof of the charger that bore Nolan to his death at Balaklava; it is surmounted with a small silver figure of the Captain, carrying the fatal order for the advance of the Light Brigade. An interesting military souvenir enough; but not so interesting as a polished and shod hoof, mounted so as to serve as a snuff-box, the property of the Guards’ Club; for this bears the inscription: ‘Hoof of Marengo, rare charger of Napoleon, ridden by him at Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram, in the campaign of Russia, and lastly at Waterloo;’ while on the margin of the silver shoe is to be read: ‘Marengo was wounded in the near hip at Waterloo, when his great master was on him, in the hollow road in advance of the French position. He had been frequently wounded before in other battles.’