Charles Kingsley’s pets, and those of Charles Dickens, have been so often and so fully described, that any further description seems superfluous. Timber, Turk and Linda, Mrs. Bouncer, Bumble and Sultan, were only a few of his many dogs; while Dick the canary—“best of birds”—a succession of kittens, an eagle, and various ravens, were among the pets that kept matters lively at Gadshill.
Of the ravens, the most famous was Grip, who sat for his portrait in Barnaby Rudge, and whose stuffed body still exists.
There are no brighter letters, no finer poems in literature, than those which “Flush, my Dog,” called out from Mrs. Browning—letters and verse so vivid, so delicately discriminative, that they amply supply the lack of other portraiture, and in them Flush still lives. Listen:
“Like a lady’s ringlets brown,
Flow thine silken ears adown
Either side demurely
Of thy silver-suited breast,
Shining out from all the rest
Of thy body purely.
“Darkly brown thy body is