The noble mastiff lies stately and serene, his vast bulk tempered by his perfect proportions, and by a gait worthy of the king of dogs. His well-opened hazel eyes look with honest straightforwardness full in your face. His huge ears hang down quietly. His jaws are closed and overlapped by his deep jowl. He is the beau-ideal of strength in restraint and repose, as he lies there with one paw, like that of a lion’s cub, hanging idly over the framework of his couch, and the other half-turned inwards, as if he were about to put it on his heart, in token of the true gentleman he is.
From within the same pent-house, where he is freely tolerated as a lively child companion, protrudes the small confident head—bristling with hair, the knowing little ears erect, the tongue half-thrust out at one side, equivalent to being stuck in the cheek—of the briskest, most undaunted of terriers. I suppose it is because we all know many versions—both human and canine—of this pair of friends, that we are so fond of looking at them and admiring their union in diversity.
I can never see “Dignity and Impudence” without thinking of a couple of dogs belonging to friends of mine, and that were said to bear a striking and exact resemblance to the dogs in the picture. I had not the good fortune to know this living “Dignity and Impudence,” though I long looked forward to the pleasure; but I happened to hear a great deal of them, and registered their traits with interest.
Wallace and Dick were north-country dogs, as is evidenced by the name of the first—he would have been Bevis in England. They dwelt within sight of a purple spur of the Grampians, known as the Braes of Angus. Their home was a hospitable farm-house, among fresh breezy uplands, with that element of breadth and freedom which belongs to hill countries, where, side by side with the cultivated fields, lies a wide moor and remnant of ancient forest, and where the ground is broken—and now falls gradually in a sunny slope—now dips abruptly into a shady dell, or den, as we call it in Scotland. The last is a place of spreading beeches, feathery larches, waving birks, and a great wealth of ferns and wild flowers in spring and early summer, and with a never-failing wimpling burn threading its recesses. It is quite distinct from a wild heathery glen. The neighbourhood to which I allude has quaint old mansions, some of which existed in the stirring times when the glens and dens served as passes for “John Hielandman,” rustling in his plaid and kilt, and bristling with his claymore and skene-dhu. He did not bring down cattle—long-horned kylies—like the modern drover, but came, saw, and lifted what “nowt” he fancied on lowland pastures, goading them up among the mountains to the headquarters of the chief and his dhuinnewassels. An ancient town with steep, narrow streets, having a feudal castle on a tree-crowned rock above a brawling river, and the remains of an abbey, is the market town of the district. On the road to this town one has a glimpse from a distance of the silver shield of the German ocean, with a larger town on its brink.
Wallace and Dick could not have been more highly favoured in the matter of locality, though they had been lovers of the picturesque—not the picturesque on a stage scale, but the quality which is large and primitive—and though they had deliberately gratified their æsthetic tastes by pitching their tents in this region, which is fresh on the hottest summer day, and has a bracing keenness, not a chill sluggishness, in its winter cold.
Wallace came first to the farm-house a tremendous puppy, for the most part generous and docile in his conscious power, but not without elements of savageness and danger in him, if he were suffered to grow up undisciplined.
I have heard his master tell that, when Wallace was a young dog, one winter night he took more than his own share of the hearthrug, on which his master’s solitary chair was also drawn up. The man, desiring more space to move in, gave the dog an unceremonious push, which roused in him such lurking ill-humour as besets us all at times; only Wallace was a mighty brute, unsupplied with the reins of reason and conscience wherewith to check his passions, and furnished on the other hand with the instinct of quick retaliation and fierce, disproportioned revenge. He gave a low growl, like muttered thunder, and made a half-spring at his master, who recognised on the instant that an unexpected crisis had come, which was to settle whether he was to be the master of the beast or the beast was to be his master, and which placed for the moment his very life in danger. Acting on the impulse of self-preservation, rather than on any deliberate design, he snatched up the poker, and dealt the dog a blow which felled him, and left him stunned and motionless. Quick remorse followed the deed, as the assailant asked himself, had he slain his comrade outright on the spot, and that for the merest ebullition of temper? If Wallace had betrayed some traces of the savage, who else had been cruel in unsparing punishment?
But Wallace came to himself almost before his master could make the compunctious reflection, rose and took himself off with lowered crest and submissive head and tail, clearly acknowledging himself beaten, and as clearly evincing the extreme of shame, for having been guilty of provoking the unequal contest. Unlike man, the dog bore no malice for his defeat; it simply called out in him that unswerving loyalty which has no parallel. From that day to the hour of his death, in a ripe old age, Wallace never again disputed his master’s sovereign will, or disobeyed his direct command, but awarded him the most devoted allegiance. The dog’s great strength, his solid sense for a dog, his rare magnanimity, were, from the era of his conquest, laid, together with his fervent attachment, at the feet of his conqueror—for the dog is another St. Christopher.
Under the influence of this absolute submission[A] to his master, rather than from any mere superficial cleverness, such as may be readily found in mere trick-performing dogs, Wallace could be taught a variety of acquirements, and was in the end so accomplished a dog that I fear I cannot call to mind a tithe of his attainments. I believe he could sit up in any attitude or assumption of character, or throw down his body in any required posture, and remain so for a given time. He could mimic swimming at the word of command. He could constitute himself a pony for little children—indeed he was not less than some Shetland ponies—and he would carry them decorously round the room or the garden on his back. He could—and this was probably the hardest task of all—at his master’s bidding, lie down in a meadow where a herd of cattle fed, and permit the whole of the oxen to gather lowing round him, and even to lick him with their rough tongues, without his stirring or offering the smallest resistance.
Wallace was somewhat up in years before Dick came on the scene. He also arrived at the farm-house a puppy, but it was not at first intended that he should remain there. The master of the house had kindly procured Dick with the intention of giving him to a friend when he himself became so enamoured of the little dog’s briskness and pluck, and at the same time so persuaded that these qualities would be wasted in the quiet life of the woman for whom Dick had been originally got, that he substituted another and more suitable dog, and kept the little man for his own portion.