Take out your puppy for a walk, and you will find the little ball of fur clumsy, stupid, bewildered, but natural.  Let but a few months pass, and when you repeat the process you will find nature buried in convention.  He will do nothing plainly; but the simplest processes of our material life will all be bent into the forms of an elaborate and mysterious etiquette.  Instinct, says the fool, has awakened.  But it is not so.  Some dogs—­some, at the very least—­if they be kept separate from others, remain quite natural; and these, when at length they meet with a companion of experience, and have the game explained to them, distinguish themselves by the severity of their devotion to its rules.  I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would radiantly illuminate the point; but men, like dogs, have an elaborate and mysterious etiquette.  It is their bond of sympathy that both are the children of convention.

The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned to some degree of humbug; the sense of the law in their members[10] fatally precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing.  And the converse is true; and in the elaborate and conscious manners of the dog, moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed.  To follow for ten minutes in the street some swaggering, canine cavalier, is to receive a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body; in every act and gesture you see him true to a refined conception; and the dullest cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody that charming ease.  For to be a high-mannered and high-minded gentleman, careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the dog.  The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with matter, so majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the dramatic means to wholly represent the part.  And it is more pathetic and perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney.[11] For the ideal of the dog is feudal and religious;[12] the ever-present polytheism, the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the other, their singular difference of size and strength among themselves effectually prevents the appearance of the democratic notion.  Or we might more exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle presented by a school—­ushers, monitors, and big and little boys—­qualified by one circumstance, the introduction of the other sex.  In each, we should observe a somewhat similar tension of manner, and somewhat similar points of honour.  In each the larger animal keeps a contemptuous good humour; in each the smaller annoys him with wasp-like impudence, certain of practical immunity; in each we shall find a double life producing double characters, and an excursive and noisy heroism combined with a fair amount of practical timidity.  I have known dogs, and I have known school heroes that, set aside the fur, could hardly have been told apart; and if we desire to understand the chivalry of old, we must turn to the school playfields or the dungheap where the dogs are trooping.