EVERYBODY’S PETS.
The world’s not seen him yet,
Who has not loved a pet.
Not the human pets of noted persons, such as Walter Scott’s Pet Marjorie, that winsome, precocious little witch, so loved by the “Wizard of the North,” or Bettina von Arnim, the eccentric, brilliant girl, whose rhapsodic idolatry was placidly encouraged by the great Goethe, but the dumb favourites of distinguished men and women.
I must devote a few pages to the various tributes to insects, birds, and animals, written about with love, pity, or admiration, yet not as pets, as Burns’s address to the Mousie:
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
And justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor earth-born companion