Part 11

--“more love again Than dogs often take of men”?

Flush was a gift from Miss Mitford, another authoress devoted to dogs; and the rival claims of these ladies for their pets, may still pleasantly amuse us. “How is your Flushie?” inquires Miss Mitford. “Mine becomes every day more and more beautiful, and more and more endearing. His little daughter Rose is the very moral of him, and another daughter (a puppy four months old, your Flushie’s half-sister) is so much admired in Reading that she has already been stolen four times--a tribute to her merit which might be dispensed with; and her master having offered ten pounds reward, it seems likely enough that she will be stolen four times more. They are a beautiful race, and that is the truth of it.”

Now hear Miss Barrett (as she was at this time) telling Mr. Horne:

“Never in the world was another such dog as my Flush. Just now, because after reading your note, I laid it down thoughtfully without taking anything else up, he threw himself into my arms, as much as to say, ‘Now it’s my turn. You’re not busy at all now.’ He understands every thing I say, and would not disturb me for the world. Do not tell Miss Mitford--but her Flush, (whom she brought to see me) is not to be compared to mine! quite animal and dog--natural, and incapable of my Flush’s hyper-cynical refinement.”

“My Flush,” she writes elsewhere, “my Flush, who is a gentleman.”

Our next glimpse of this well-bred favorite is due to Mr. Westwood, a friend and correspondent of the lady. “On one occasion,” he says, “she had expressed to me her regret at Flush’s growing plumpness, and I suppose I must have been cruel enough to suggest starvation as a remedy, for her next letter opens with an indignant protest:

“Starve Flush! Starve Flush! My dear Mr. Westwood, what are you thinking of?... He is fat, certainly--but he has been fatter ... and he may, therefore, become thinner. And then he does not eat after the manner of dogs. I never saw a dog with such a lady-like appetite. To eat two small biscuits in succession is generally more than he is inclined to do. When he has meat it is only once a day, and it must be so particularly well cut up and offered to him on a fork, and he is so subtly discriminative as to differences between boiled mutton and roast mutton, and roast chicken and boiled chicken, that often he walks away in disdain, and will have none of it....

“My nearest approach to starving Flush is to give general instructions to the servant who helps him to his dinner, ‘not to press him to eat.’ I know he ought not to be fat--I know it too well--and his father being, according to Miss Mitford’s account, ‘square,’ at this moment, there is an hereditary reason for fear. So he is not to be ‘pressed.’”

Flush left England with his mistress after her marriage, and lived to a good old age in her Italian home. His doggish heart was never torn by seeing younger, more agile pets preferred to himself. Secure in the only affection he valued, he passed quietly out of life; and nothing now remains of his mortality save a lock of hair, which was treasured by Robert Browning.

One word more of Miss Mitford. Her chief favorite was the greyhound Mossy, who died in 1819. She wrote an account of his death which no one ever saw until it was found, after her own death, sealed in an envelope, together with some of his hair. It repeats the well-known burden of the faithful lamenting the faithful: “No human being was ever so faithful, so gentle, so generous, and so fond. I shall never love anything half so well.”

Robert Browning declared himself a partisan of cats and owls--tastes which have suggested different gifts from friends. An owl inkstand on his desk seemed to be brooding over the thoughts whisked out of it by Browning’s pen; an owl paper-weight steadied these same thoughts when transferred to paper. Stuffed owls, pictured owls, looked down upon him as he wrote. With regard to cats, who have much secret affinity with owls, his opinions were equally liberal, and he notes with the eye of an artist their wonderful grace and beauty.

A friend of the Brownings in Florence, Miss Isa Blagden, had many pets of her own, charitably gathered from the ranks of the distressed. She is probably best known to American readers by her poem to Bushie, the favorite dog of Charlotte Cushman.

After giving, in her fourteen years of life, “the minimum of trouble and the maximum of pleasure,” Bushie died in Rome, in 1867, and was buried in the garden of Miss Cushman’s house. On the broken column which marked the spot were cut the words:

BUSHIE, COMES FIDELLISSIMA.

If further epitaph be needed, this verse from Miss Blagden’s poem will suffice:

“From all our lives some faith, some trust, With thy dear life is o’er; A lifelong love lies in thy dust: Can human grave hide more?”

Landor and his dogs made another well-known group in Florence. Of Landor, Lowell says that, “there was something of challenge even in the alertness of his pose, and the head was often thrown back like that of a boxer who awaits a blow.” This fine, defiant old head was often seen lovingly bent towards Parigi, Pomero, and Giallo--dogs of pedigree and sense, who cheered his solitude, or adorned his social hours.

Pomero, a Pomeranian, with feathery white hair and bright eyes, lived in England with Landor, in the town of Bath. All knew him there, and saluted him, while he in return barked sociably to all. “Not for a million of money would I sell him,” cried Landor. “A million would not make me at all happier, and the loss of Pomero would make me miserable for life.”

This loss nevertheless soon came. “Seven years,” wrote his master, “we lived together, in more than amity. He loved me to his heart--and what a heart it was! Mine beats audibly while I write about him.” Over his “blameless dust” was inscribed this epitaph, so tender and sweet in its Latin, that translation seems a wrong:

“O urna! nunquam sis tuo ernta portuls: Cor intus est fidele, nam cor est canis. Vale, portule! ætemumque, Pomero! vale. Sed, sidatur, nostri memor.”

Giallo, also a Pomeranian, was a gift from the sculptor Story. He became a great favorite with his master, who would often talk doggerel to please him, and maintained that he was the best critic in Italy. “Giallo and I think” so and so, he would often say; or, “I think so, and Giallo quite agrees.” That he was quite fit for heaven, was another belief with his master. Who knows? Perhaps he was!

Victor Hugo’s happy family comprised both cats and dogs. There was Chougna, the watch-dog, and Sénat, the greyhound, whose collar bore the inscription: “I wish some one would take me home. Who is my master? Hugo. What’s my name? Sénat.” There were the Angora kittens, Gavroche I. and Gavroche II., and Mouche, the great black-and-white cat; the latter, according to an intimate friend, was “silencieuse, défiante, ténébreuse, sinistre--the cat of the prison, and of exile”--attributes confirmed by her portrait.

From sheer force of contrast, both Mouche and Hugo must have enjoyed--had they known him--General Muff, the stately and affable favorite of an American authoress (Miss Mary L. Booth). I called upon this lady one day to request of her an introduction to the General; but he took matters into his own paws, as it were, and introduced himself before she could appear. Exquisitely dignified and urbane, his composure was not ruffled by the very wildest gambols of a Persian kitten, who darted, glanced and flashed hither and thither in the room like flame.

He wore the famous Fayal collar in which he was photographed. He wore it because of artistic preference, I suppose--certainly not because he had nothing else to wear; for I saw in his own particular wardrobe collars of all kinds and colors, from dainty ribbon to Russia leather.

May it be long before Muff’s gracious personality requires an epitaph! but when that time comes, the following lines will apply to him as fitly as to the one for whom they were written--the poet Whittier’s cat, Bathsheba:

“Whereat None said ‘Scat!’ Better cat Never sat On a mat, Or caught a rat, Than this cat. Requiescat!”

All who are familiar with the poem by Matthew Arnold, on Geist’s Grave, or another, on Kaiser, Dead, know the story, told as he alone could tell it, of this great author’s pets.

The dachshund Geist lived four brief years, then “humbly laid” him “down to die.” Dearly loved, remembered always--often and often would his friends recall his “liquid, melancholy eye,” his wistful face at the window, the scuffle of his feet upon the stair, and his “small, black figure on the snow.” But “there is no photograph of poor little Geist,” says Mr. Arnold, “except one taken after his death, which gives pleasure to us, but could give it to no one else. There is, however, an excellent portrait of another dog of mine, Max, in a birthday book from my poems, but it is weighted by a very bad portrait of his master.”