UNICORN.—­What a fate is ours!  Here have we, in our time, been compelled to give the patronage of our countenance to all sorts of rascality—­have been forced to support robbery, swindling, extortion—­but it won’t do to think of—­give me the pot.  Oh! dear, it had suited better with my conscience, had I been doomed to draw a sand-cart!

LION.—­Come, come, no unseemly affectation. You, at the best, are only a fiction—­a quadruped lie.

UNICORN.—­I know naturalists dispute my existence, but if, as you unkindly say, I am only a fiction, why should I have been selected as a supporter of the royal arms?

LION.—­Why, you fool, for that very reason.  Have you been where you are for so many years, and yet don’t know that often, in state matters, the greater the lie the greater the support?

UNICORN.—­Right.  When I reflect—­I have greater doubts of my truth, seeing where I am.

LION.—­But here am I, in myself a positive majesty, degraded into a petty-larceny scoundrel; yes, all my inherent attributes compromised by my position.  Oh, Hercules! when I remember my native Africa—­when I reflect on the sweet intoxication of my former liberty—­the excitement of the chase—­the mad triumph of my spring, cracking the back of a bison with one fillip of my paw—­when I think of these things—­of my tawny wife with her smile sweetly ferocious, her breath balmy with new blood—­of my playful little ones, with eyes of topaz and claws of pearl—­when I think of all this, and feel that here I am, a damned rabbit-sucker—­

UNICORN.—­Don’t swear.

LION.—­Why not?  God knows, we’ve heard swearing enough of all sorts in our time.  It isn’t the fault of our position, if we’re not first-rate perjurers.

UNICORN.—­That’s true:  still, though we are compelled to witness all these things in the courts of law, let us be above the influence of bad example.

LION.—­Give me the pot.  Courts of law?  Oh, Lord! what places they put us into!  And there they expect me—­me, the king of the animal world, to stand quietly upon my two hind-legs, looking as mildly contemptible as an apoplectic dancing-master,—­whilst iniquities, and meannesses, and tyranny, and—­give me the pot.

UNICORN:—­Brother, you’re getting warm.  Really, you ought to have seen enough of state and justice to take everything coolly.  I certainly must confess that—­looking at much of the policy of the country, considering much of the legal wickedness of law-scourged England—­it does appear to me a studied insult to both of us to make us supporters of the national quarterings.  Surely, considering the things that have been done under our noses, animals more significant of the state and social policy might have been promoted to our places.  Instead of the majestic lion and the graceful unicorn, might they not have had the—­the—­

LION.—­The vulture and the magpie.

UNICORN.—­Excellent!  The vulture would have capitally typified many of the wars of the state, their sole purpose being so many carcases—­whilst, for the courts of law, the magpie would have been the very bird of legal justice and legal wisdom.