horses for these favoured beings to ride. As was to be expected, Scott prefers horses and dogs to other animals. No one needs to be reminded of the black steed of the heroic Claverhouse in "Old Mortality" and the noble hound in the "Talisman."

Macaulay is another writer who is a lover of horses. In the "Battle of Lake Regillus" he has two finely-drawn and touching pictures-one of the steed, Black Auster, standing over his dead master on the battle-field, the other of the "dark grey charger" fleeing home to fall on his knees at the door of his widowed mistress.

It is when we come to the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that we are conscious of a development in man's relations to other animals. Chaucer and Spenser, Dryden and Shakespeare, Macaulay, Scott, and Sterne, and their contemporaries, write of them, sometimes tenderly, sometimes humorously, but generally with a suggestion of de haut en bas. It is as if later writers regained in some measure the simple point of view of the long-ago tale-tellers who hob-nobbed with talking horses and changed their knights and princesses into doves and swans, toads and seals. There is a renewal of the power to receive all living beings as, in a way, on an equal footing. Creatures generally regarded as alien, obnoxious, or contemptible, are dignified. The Ancient Mariner hanging over the ship, "by the light of the moon beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm":

Beyond the shadow of the ship

I watched the water-snakes:

They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light

Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire:

Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,

They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

Oh, happy living things! No tongue
Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware!

Blake's "Tiger, tiger, burning bright," is full of a childlike wonder, a reverence of the wild beast's beauty and power, of the mystery of its creation; recalling the sympathetic awe with which the Biblical poet speaks of the wild horse and leviathan, and the Celtic story-teller of the magic hounds which "darted like swallows." Blake's imagination bows before the "immortal Hand and Eye” which have framed the tiger's "fearful symmetry." It, also, is God's creature; the poet thinks not of its enmity to man, but of its own fierce joys of life "in the forest of the night." There is a deep meaning, too-if a certain unhappy absurdity of expression-in Blake's "caterpillar on the leaf" which reminds him " of his mother's grief."

In Shelley's" Sensitive Plant" the lady bears away into the woods the "killing insects and gnawing worms which would be hurtful to her garden

In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.

I know of a lady who, inspired by this tender picture, made a collection of the cockroaches with which her house was infested, and carrying them out of the city, deposited them in a green field in the suburbs. I do not know how the cockroaches liked the field, nor how the householders in the neighbourhood of the field liked the cockroaches when they arrived; but I think that the story shows that poetry does not appeal in vain.

A poet more modern than Coleridge, Blake, or Shelley -Mr. W. B. Yeats-in one of his most exquisite poems, tells how

In a plashy place,
A lug-worm raised its grey and muddy mouth
And sang...

And there is a tender beauty peculiarly his own, but in part typical of his age, in his idealisation of creatures commonly regarded with horror:

The worms that spired about his bones
A-telling with their low and reedy cry

Of how God leans His hands out of the sky. . .

Here there is a noble sense of the oneness of all Nature and her own unity with God; a submission to, and recognition of, the beauty of all her laws.

to men

But to say that the modern relations between men and animals have regained something from the long-ago is to describe only one aspect of them. They are a development, not a mere recovery. The old poets accorded to animals a respect somewhat like that which they gave a feeling which was coexistent with habits of beheading, stabbing, burning, and mutilating each other. The struggle for life was a thing of course: it was, perhaps, only in his songs that man could give voice to his rudimentary feeling that all men were brothers and all animals man's "little brothers." But our extension of the rights of men has, as its logical outcome, the realisation of the claims of animals. What in the old poets were flashes of fantasy, of insight, have become fixed truths, principles. We no longer accept life as a simple thing not to be questioned; and this growing sense of the darkness that encompasses us shows itself in an increased desire to help, to pity, to understand. "Hartleap Well " and "The Ancient Mariner" owe their greatness not only to the candour of their point of view, but to the awful and mysterious sense that in slain birds and beasts the God of Nature is Himself "killed all the day long." The Orpheus voice now calls to the wild brute in man, luring it out of the dark places, the habitations of cruelty.

This spirit is apparent not only in makers of poetry, but is spreading among all classes of writers. One thinks of a hundred examples in the works of recent novelists of

different countries of Loti's "Livre de la Pitié et de la Mort"; of Zola's "Why I Love my Dog" (in "L'Ami des Bêtes"); of Mr. Hichens' presentment of "Jessie” and "Rip" in "Flames "; of the picture of the dying sheep, crushed by the locomotive, in Frank Morris's “Octopus "; of Jack London's "Call of the Wild"; of Mr. Blatchford's "Gentle Savage." Even the popular magazine has been invaded by "sentimentalism "; even the daily newspaper. Some months ago there was published in the Strand a short story by Mr. Basil Tozer. It treated of fox-hunting, describing how an enthusiast for that sport was enabled to see it from a different point of view. It was a fine story, finely written: but I think that I am right in believing that, not long ago, such a contribution would not have appeared in a magazine the aim of which was to win popular favour. The newspapers, too, have surprises of I have read in an evening provincial paper an article descriptive of a Belgian slaughter-house-an article which, in its realisation of the horror of its subject, no less than its ability, might almost be the work of Tolstoy himself.

We

There is no doubt that we have moved from our position at the centre of things. We realise that the animal is an individual with certain interests apart from ours; with claims other than “fidelity” to our sympathy. hesitate to say that the sheep was made to give us wool and mutton, the cow to supply us with milk, the horse to draw our burdens. We are troubled by a whimsical fancy of a tigress or lioness gathering her little ones about her on a Sunday afternoon and telling them—

"My dears, God made men to be food for us. That this is so is proved by the fact that, in those countries where there are no wild beasts, human beings multiply rapidly, the professions and trades are all overstocked, competition ensues, and the unfortunate creatures fall on and destroy one another———————”

M. LITTLE.

A PLEA FOR THE HONEST DEBTOR

THE System of imprisonment for debt now in vogue in this country is, in effect, a system of collecting debts from the wage-earning class, and that class only, for the great bulk of those against whom orders are issued are working people - simple agricultural labourers and mill-girls, widows who try to run small businesses without capital-all of them unfortunate and weak, it may be, but deserving of our sympathy nevertheless. It is certainly strange that the working class, of all least able to look after its rights and most needing legislative protection, should be at the mercy of the professional imprisoners. Feeble old men, poor wretched women, protest in vain that obedience to the order of the court is an utter impossibility: the judge names the amount, and they are given over into the hands of the rapacious creditor. His Honour Judge Parry, in a notable address which he delivered in Manchester two or three years ago, strongly condemned the present system of collecting debts, and described it as "a grave social wrong, injuring the lives and happiness of the working classes, leading them into unnecessary temptation, and robbing them of their wages, or, at least, of the full spending power of the wages they have worked for." A labouring man who owes a few pounds-one pound or so to the grocer, and a few shillings each to the draper, baker, greengrocer, and butcher-is frequently the mere servant of his creditors. His weekly earnings go to pay off one lot of debts, or part of them, while he gets more goods, and