As huge he lieth in a den that hath them full in face;
But when the adders she beheld upon his crest up-borne,
A sleepy morsel honey-steeped and blent of wizard's corn,
She cast him: then his three-fold throat, all wild with hunger's lack,
He opened wide, and caught at it, and sank his monstrous back,
And there he lay upon the earth enormous through the cave."
Sigurd would softly thump his tail in cadence with the melancholy beat of a dog elegy, whether Prior's tribute to the virtues of Queen Mary's True, or Gay's ironic consolation to Celia on the death of her lap-dog Shock, Cowper's impartial epitaphs for My Lord's pointer Neptune and My Lady's spaniel Fop, Lehmann's memorial of his retriever, who
"Chose, since official dogs at times unbend,
The household cat for confidante and friend,"
Louise Imogen Guiney's lament for