For dog, like man, is a pitiful, sneaking rogue.”
Such a disagreeable sentiment as this—one so unworthy both of man and author—requires an antidote. We find one in these lines of Herrick to his spaniel Tracy:
“Now thou art dead, no eye shall ever see
For shape and service spaniel like to thee.
This shall my love doe, give thy sad fate one
Teare, that deserves of me a million.”
This is all we know of Tracy, but it suffices enough. A faithful dog, a fond master—in these words his story is told.
Bounce—named most suggestive—belonged to Alexander Pope; Bean, to the gentler poet, Cowper. Goldsmith had a dog, of course, and equally of course it was a poodle. No creature less comic would serve his turn. Sir Joshua Reynolds tells a story of the pair which reads like a fragment from the Vicar of Wakefield: how one morning he called on the improvident author, rather expecting to find him in low spirits, and found him, instead, at his table, alternately writing a few words, and looking over at the poodle which he had made stand on its hind legs in a corner of the room.
In this fashion the impecunious one was amusing himself; and the great artist looked on, no less amused in truth, and pleasantly sympathetic. If only he had painted the scene, one wishes.