Part 74

From Hector Boethius it is clear that the Canes Scotici (qu. Canes Celtici) were superior to the native dogs of the isle: “Ut Picti suos canes Scoticis, pulchritudine, velocitate, laboris patientià, simul atque audaciâ longè inferiores animadvertissent: hujusmodi generis canum cupidi, ut penès se essent, è quibus nascerentur, quosdam utriusque sexûs à Scotis nobilibus dono accepêre: alios finito venatu, rege abeunte in Atholiam, à custodibus clàm abstraxêre, et inter eos venaticum quendam candore nivali, eximiâ pernicitate, formâ eleganti, audentiâque suprà communem canum facultatem, quem Crathlintus habuit in deliciis, insignem,” &c. See also Fordun. Scotichron. L. +ii.+ c. +xlii.+ (Regnante Diocletiano).

Julius Cæsar says of Britain, “Maritima pars ab iis incolitur qui prædæ ac belli inferendi causâ ex Belgis transierant.” Ptolemy and Tacitus confirm the supposed connexion of the Britons and Gauls; “Proximi Gallis et similes sunt,” says the latter, “seu durante originis vi; seu procurrentibus in diversa terris, positio cœli corporibus habitum dedit. In universum tamen æstimanti, Gallos vicinum solum occupâsse credibile est.” And Juvenal tells us, in Hadrian’s reign, that British lawyers learned Greek and Roman eloquence of their Gallic neighbours—

Gallia causidicos docuit facunda Britannos.

Indeed, from the coast of Kent to the extremity of Caithness and Ulster, the memory of a Celtic origin was for centuries distinctly preserved in the perpetual resemblance of language, religious rites, and domestic customs and manners. As an example of similarity of habits in the insular and continental Celtæ, it may be noted that Arrian records the marked adoration paid by the latter to Diana Agrotera; and Holinshed, on the authority of earlier historians, observes, “Amongst other the Goddes also, whiche the Scottishmen had in most reverence, Diana was chiefe, whom they accompted as their peculiar patronesse, for that she was taken to be the Goddesse of hunting, wherein consisted their chiefest exercise, pastime and delite.” Not being able to fix with accuracy the date of their irruption into Britain in the dark ages of our early annals, this laborious chronicler is inclined to consider the Celtic Scoti “such as by obscure invasion have nestled in this islande;” but subsequently, in his “Historie of Irelande,” he suggests a date later than the birth of Christ for the inhabitancy of the Scoti on British soil (circiter A. D. 300.), though previously in occupation of Ireland and the Hebrides.

Wernsdorf, who does not in general attempt to apply his poet’s instructions to any particular variety of hound, admits the Canis tiro, entered to the hare, vs. 186. seqq., to be of the Vertragus type.

It is worthy of notice that, whereas the earlier Greek and Latin Cynegetica recommend heterogeneous commixture in breeding for the chase—crossing the canine families of different countries with each other, under the hope of improving the pure indigenæ—Nemesian contends for parity of sort, and purity of blood, to supply the greyhound kennel, (“huic parilem submitte parem,” &c.); as if aware, with the modern courser, that the essential attributes of the Celtic type would necessarily be impaired, if not annihilated, by the admixture of alien blood. Arrian’s silence too, on the subject of omnifarious copulation, indicates a conviction of its inapplicability to breeding for the leash.

There are some curious remarks on the colour of hunting-dogs “fit for to course withall,” in chasing of the stag, in The Countrie Farme, B. +vii.+ c. 22. p. 837. edit. 1600,—the reference to which is omitted in my annotations on Arrian.

Under the title of le lévrier d’attache, the French Encyclopedia unites the Irish and Scotch varieties. “C’est le plus robuste et le plus courageux des lévriers; en Scythie on l’emploie à garder le bétail, qui n’est jamais enfermé. On en trouve en Ecosse, en Irlande, en Tartarie, et chez presque tous les peuples du Nord: il poursuit le loup, le sanglier, quelquefois même le buffle et le taureau sauvage.” The common English greyhound is le lévrier de plaine of France. The former sorts are the Lyciscæ of Savary,

Enormesque, animis pedis et levitate Lyciscæ Præstantes, apris certare lupisque paratæ, &c.

Gesner has introduced into his Appendix a representation of the “Canis Scoticus Venaticus, quem Scoti vocant ane grewhownd, id est canem Græcum:” and calls it “genus venaticum cum celerrimum tum audacissimum: nec modò in feras, sed in hostes etiam latronesque præsertim si dominum ductoremve injuriâ affici cernat, aut in eos concitetur.” See “the Complaynt of Bagsche, the Kingis auld hound,” by Lyndsay, for a quaint description of some of the qualities of the highland breed. Poor Cilhart, too, the luckless wolf-hound of the precipitate Llewellyn, will furnish an early example of the mountain sort. Nor should the Ossianic Maida—καλὸς μὲν δέμας ἐστὶν—by Landseer, be overlooked, as a splendid type of the race on canvass; though not quite Celtic in his blood.

A breed of Sagaci-celeres is at present preserved in Scotland, between the English greyhound and Leicestershire fox-hound: the first cross of which is represented to be remarkably handsome, fleet, and courageous. This race is employed for the deer-chase in the forest of Athol and elsewhere.

The hound described in the Linnean Society’s Transactions is stated to have been only 61 inches in length—a size surpassed by an example of the Canis Graius of the purest blood and greatest speed, (“facilis cui plurima palma,”) 62 inches long, now in my possession—ἔτι γάρ μοι ἦν, as Arrian says of his much-loved Hormé, ὁπότε ταῦτα ἔγραφον. But it is probable that the beautifully-majestic animal, which assisted in extirpating the wolf from the sylvan fastnesses of our islands, was heretofore of far greater size than the writer’s ἄῤῥην κύων τῇ ἀληθείᾳ γενναῖος—of whom he might farther say in the words of Ovid,

non dicere posses Laude pedum formæne bono præstantior esset.

Indeed Mr. Ray’s definition of the Canis Graius Hibernicus makes him of the greatest size of the whole canine race; “Canis omnium quos hactenùs vidimus maximus, Molossum ipsum magnitudine superans—quod ad formam corporis et mores attinet, cani Græco vulgari per omnia similis. Horum usus est ad lupos capiendos.”

If the reader be interested in the arcana of wolf-catching, he will find illustrations, and anecdotes thereof, in Oppian. Cyneg. +iv.+ vs. 212.—in the Venationes Ferarum of Strada and Galle (pl. 49.)—Lupos Venandi Ratio of J. A. Lonicer—La Chasse du Loup of Jean de Clamorgan—=Mayster of Game=, c. +vii.+ fo. 40.—Turbervile’s Art of Venerie, p. 208.—Venationis Lupinæ Leges of Savary, &c. The latter author turns out his whole kennel and armoury for the annihilation of this “fera bellua”—even the anathematized lévrier is now admitted:

Non hanc, quæ lepori, nec quæ indulgentia cervo Debetur, meruêre lupi: fera bellua nullo Non sternenda modo: non illam sexus et ætas, Nullaque tempestas violento à funere servet. Non hîc Spartani canis interdicitur usu; Lina placent, catapulta juvat, venabula, cippus, Decipulæ, foveæ, atque podostraba, pardalianches, Et concurrentis vaga vociferatio plebis.

Derived from the Irish greyhound, and not very far removed from the original stock, was the gazehound of past days:

Seest thou the gazehound, how with glance severe From the close herd he marks the destined deer; How every nerve the greyhound’s stretch displays, The hare preventing in her airy maze, &c.

By Dr. Caius, he is supposed to be faithfully portrayed in the following extract: “Quod visu lacessit, nare nihil agit, sed oculo: oculo vulpem leporemque persequitur, oculo seligit medio de grege feram, et eam non nisi bene saginatam et opimam: oculo insequitur: oculo perditam requirit: oculo, si quando in gregem redeat, secernit, cæteris relictis omnibus, secretamque cursu denuò fatigat ad mortem. Agasæum nostri abs re quod intento sit in feram oculo, vocant,” &c. To this portrait I can assimilate no dog at present known in this country, (though, it is probable, such might be produced between the Irish greyhound and blood-hound,) nor do the classic ages afford any counterpart to it.

Hor. Od. +i.+ L. +i.+ 27.

For Dacier’s explanation of the “catuli fideles” of Horace—“seu visa est catulis cerva fidelibus”—as des chiens qui suivent bien la bête, qui ne prennent jamais le change, so readily acceded to by the Delphin annotator, as portraying the English gazehound, is far too fanciful to establish a race of these “chasseurs à vue” in ancient Italy. Horace merely gives sagacity and steadiness to deer-hounds, or possibly the negative quality of not opening in pursuit of their game.

To this definition Ray subjoins, “nonnullis Scoticus,” as if he considered the Scotch greyhound of the same type—that there was, in short, only one variety—the English and Scotch being identical. The additional words would of course include the supplementary hound of Gesner’s Appendix, and probably were added with that intent.

Arrian’s work was unknown to the great German naturalist—not having been discovered in the Vatican library, when he compiled his celebrated Historia Animalium, nor indeed till a century later. That Ray, too, was unacquainted with the Greek Manual, seems equally clear. Thence the strong points of resemblance in the ancient and modern descriptions of a dog, hypothetically the same, impart the more interest, and obtain the more credence, from the impossibility of a collusive adaptation of the one to the other, and from both portraits corresponding with the images of the Celtic hound, which have come down to us on ancient monuments, the Arch of Constantine, gems, numismata, &c. &c.

See Arrian. de Venatione, c. +xviii.+ εὖγε ὦ Κιῤῥὰ, εὖγε ὦ Βόννα, καλῶς γε ὦ Ὁρμή. These we may suppose to have been some of the names of the favourite archetypes of the Celtic kennel; but of the particular scene of their exertions we have no evidence to adduce. Born at Nicomedia, and occupied for the most part with civil and military engagements in the East, at a distance from Celtica, properly so called, (within the boundaries of the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine, and the Ocean,) we know not when or where Arrian became acquainted with the Vertragus. Was the hound existing in Asia Minor in the second century, seeing that he is noticed at a later period by the Greek poet of Cilicia, and the Platonic philosopher of Paphlagonia? The Celts themselves are found there, as colonists, at an early date—even in the very district of which Nicomedia was the metropolis. Stephanus of Byzantium mentions the Tolistoboii—ἔθνος Γαλατῶν ἑσπερίων μετοικησάντων ἐκ τῆς Κελτογαλατίας ἐς Βιθυνίαν. (See also Strabo Geogr. L. +iv.+) And other colonies are recorded by Strabo among the Thracians and Illyrians, Κελτοὺς τοὺς ἀναμεμιγμένους τοῖς τε Θρᾳξὶ καὶ τοῖς Ἰλλυριοῖς—the descendants of whom are perhaps the deer-coursers of Arrian’s 23rd chapter, whom I have there called Celto-Scythians: note 4. sub fine.

Although it is clear, almost to demonstration, that the greyhound was utterly unknown to ancient Greece in the days of the elder Xenophon, I readily allow that Greece may have been Arrian’s coursing-field, with the hound of Celtica, at a later period—an opinion supported by Janus Vlitius;—for into the south of Europe the dog had been introduced as a prodigy of speed—“ocyor affectu mentis pinnâque”—probably direct from the country of which he was indigenous, viz. Transalpine Gaul, τῆς Κελτικῆς Γαλατίας of Stephanus, (the Gallia Celtica of my annotations, without reference to Cæsar’s more limited appropriation of the term Celtica,) about the commencement of the Christian æra.

Τὰς κύνας τὰς γενναίας,—possibly the coarser and fiercer varieties of the Celtic hound—for Arrian seems to distinguish these noble-spirited dogs from the κύνα ἀγαθὴν, who, he says, may be destroyed by a stag.

The Celtæ with their colonies overran almost all Europe. We trace them from the pillars of Hercules to the extreme wilds of Scythia; the colonists of the latter territory alone being, correctly speaking, Celto-Scythæ;—but in consequence of the ignorance of the ancient Greek geographers as to the exact limits of either Celtica or Scythia, (as already remarked in my annotations on the second chapter of the Cynegeticus,) the term Celto-Scythians has been indefinitely applied to all the inhabitants of mid-Europe, from Celtica to Scythia.

It was Xenophon’s want of acquaintance with these African barbs, along with the Scythian galloways, and Celtic greyhounds, which led to the omission of them all, in his Cynegeticus: and to the lacunæ, thereby occasioned, in the older hunting-treatise, is to be attributed the supplementary one, written by the younger Athenian. But it is quite problematical whether hounds were employed at all in the Celto-Scythian and Libyan chases—indeed, it is my opinion, they were not:—for, though it be true, that Arrian recommends picked dogs, of high courage, for the stag-course, at the commencement of chapter 23, we hear nothing of hounds in the stag-chase, immediately following, on the πεδία εὐήλατα of Mœsia, Dacia, Scythia, &c.; where long-winded, and scrubby nags supply their place. And again, in the onager-chase of the Nomadic tribes of Libya, barbs alone are the pursuers, with boys upon their naked backs, continuing at full speed till the game be run down. So that οὕτω τοι θηρῶσιν, ὅσοις κύνες τε ἀγαθαὶ καὶ ἵπποι, κ. τ. λ. with which the author commences the period immediately following the description of the vanquished onager, must in part have a more remote reference than to the hunters spoken of in the same and preceding chapters—ὅσοις κύνες τε ἀγαθαὶ referring to the Celts of Western Europe, perhaps, and ἵπποι to the equestrians just before mentioned—the former class of sportsmen using swift-footed hounds, the latter horses alone. This interpretation harmonizes with Oppian’s description of the horses and hunters of Libya and Mauritania, and their chases, as already cited c. +xxiv.+ note 8.