CHAPTER V.
“THE CAVALIER’S PETS.”
DIFFERENT generations are marked by their different favourites, especially among those who have the means and the leisure for the cultivation of such predilections, in newly introduced animals and plants. Even human beings are included in this category, and so we had an era of dwarfs and an era of black boys, as half-attendants, half-playthings for fine ladies and gentlemen. Among the lower animals there was a monkey period and a macaw period, both of which have passed away in a great measure. Among plants we have had the seasons when dahlias and pansies first came into vogue and became objects of absorbing interest, and the year which saw the importation of the glorious Tom Thumb geranium.
Dogs are no exception to this influence of fashion, so that there is a double sense in which “every dog has its day.” Even living persons have seen many canine candidates for such honours. The spotted Danish hound had his day, so had the bouncing, curly, jet black Newfoundland, the grand liver-coloured mastiff, the fierce white bull-dog, the hideous crooked-legged turnspit, the hardly less ugly, long-bodied, pig-headed boar-hound, the Pomeranian, with its sleek hair and fox’s head, and the little cocker, with its indescribably comical, crushed-up nose.
The origin of some of these manias must have been whimsical enough; but our concern is with the fact that in the reign of the first Charles there became prominent as pets in England a race of small dogs known as the King Charles spaniel, and that at a later period the Blenheim spaniel came into notice. Both races were and are aristocrats of the first water, connected in the very names of the species with royal and ducal houses.
I speak as an ignorant woman; but my impression is, that the King Charles is of French nationality, and that the little brute not only came to England in the train of pretty, foolish, flighty Henrietta Maria, but that it made its appearance in Scotland two generations earlier, in the suite of the beautiful and miserable Mary Stewart. Unless tradition lie, such a dog crept beside the block at Fotheringhay—
“The little dog that licked her hand, the last of all the crowd
Which sunned themselves beneath her glance, and round her footsteps bowed.”