Perhaps the reader would be pleased to see another of Elia's contributions to Hone's "Every-Day Book." For, though Lamb's articles in that amusing and very entertaining miscellany are not very highly finished or very carefully elaborated, they contain many touches of his delicious humor and exquisite pathos, and are, indeed, replete with the quaint beauties and beautiful oddities of his very original and very delightful genius.
Sterne's sentimental description of the Dead Ass is immortal; but few of the readers and admirers of Charles Lamb know that he, who wrote so eloquently and pathetically in defence of Beggars and of Chimney-Sweepers, and who so ably and successfully vindicated the little innocent hare from the charge—made "by Linnæus perchance, or Buffon"—of being a timid animal, indited an essay on the same long-eared and loud-voiced quadruped.
THE ASS.
Mr. Collier, in his "Poetical Decameron," (Third Conversation,) notices a tract printed in 1595, with the author's initials only, A. B., entitled, "The Nobleness of the Asse: a work rare, learned, and excellent." He has selected the following pretty passage from it:—"He [the ass] refuseth no burthen; he goes whither he is sent, without any contradiction. He lifts not his foote against any one; he bytes not; he is no fugitive, nor malicious affected. He doth all things in good sort, and to his liking that hath cause to employ him. If strokes be given him, he cares not for them; and, as out modern poet singeth,—
'Thou wouldst (perhaps) he should become thy foe,
And to that end dost beat him many times:
He cares not for himselfe, much lesse thy blow.'"[B]
Certainly Nature, foreseeing the cruel usage which this useful servant to man should receive at man's hand, did prudently in furnishing him with a tegument impervious to ordinary stripes. The malice of a child or a weak hand can make feeble impressions on him. His back offers no mark to a puny foeman. To a common whip or switch his hide presents an absolute insensibility. You might as well pretend to scourge a school-boy with a tough pair of leather breeches on. His jerkin is well fortified; and therefore the costermongers "between the years 1790 and 1800" did more politicly than piously in lifting up a part of his upper garment. I well remember that beastly and bloody custom. I have often longed to see one of those refiners in discipline himself at the cart's tail, with just such a convenient spot laid bare to the tender mercies of the whipster. But, since Nature has resumed her rights, it is to be hoped that this patient creature does not suffer to extremities,—and that to the savages who still belabor his poor carcass with their blows (considering the sort of anvil they are laid upon,) he might in some sort, if he could speak, exclaim, with the philosopher, "Lay on! you beat but upon the case of Anaxarchus."
Contemplating this natural safeguard, this fortified exterior, it is with pain I view the sleek, foppish, combed, and curried person of this animal as he is transmuted and disnaturalized at watering-places, etc., where they affect to make a palfrey of him. Fie on all such sophistications! It will never do, Master Groom! Something of his honest shaggy exterior will still peep up in spite of you,—his good, rough, native, pine-apple coating. You cannot "refine a scorpion into a fish, though you rinse it and scour it with ever so cleanly cookery."[C]
The modern poet quoted by A. B. proceeds to celebrate a virtue for which no one to this day had been aware that the ass was remarkable:—
"One other gift this beast hath as his owne,
Wherewith the rest could not be furnishèd;
On man himselfe the same was not bestowne:
To wit, on him is ne'er engenderèd
The hatefull vermine that doth teare the skin,
And to the bode [body] doth make his passage in."