years, glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of their defects.  Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the last; among a thousand peccadilloes, a whole goose and a whole cold leg of mutton lay upon his conscience; but Woggs,[22] whose soul’s shipwreck in the matter of gallantry I have recounted above, has only twice been known to steal, and has often nobly conquered the temptation.  The eighth is his favourite commandment.  There is something painfully human in these unequal virtues and mortal frailties of the best.  Still more painful is the bearing of those “stammering professors"[23] in the house of sickness and under the terror of death.  It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow or other, the dog connects together, or confounds, the uneasiness of sickness and the consciousness of guilt.  To the pains of the body he often adds the tortures of the conscience; and at these times his haggard protestations form, in regard to the human deathbed, a dreadful parody or parallel.

I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the double etiquette which dogs obey; and that those who were most addicted to the showy street life among other dogs were less careful in the practice of home virtues for the tyrant man.  But the female dog, that mass of carneying[24] affectations, shines equally in either sphere; rules her rough posse of attendant swains with unwearying tact and gusto; and with her master and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning point.  The attention of man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it would thus appear) the same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read the canine heart, they would be found to flatter it in very marked degrees.  Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures.  To push their favour in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives; and their joys may lie outside.  I am in despair at our persistent ignorance.  I read in the lives of our companions the same processes of reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts of the right against the wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom; I see them with our weaknesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and with our one stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet, as they hurry by me on the street with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man.  Is man the friend, or is he the patron only?  Have they indeed forgotten nature’s voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker’s mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives?  Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul.  But doubtless, also, the masters are, in many cases, the object of a merely interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Quatorze,[25] giving and receiving flattery and favour; and the dogs, like the majority of men, have but forgotten their true existence and become the dupes of their ambition.