man; for that allowance for all delicate things, including virtue,
that should exist in any good diplomatist. Once put a thing on two
legs instead of four and pluck it of feathers and you cannot help
asking for a human being, either heroic, as in the fairy tales, or
un-heroic, as in the modern novels.

But by using animals in this austere and arbitrary style as they are
used on the shields of heraldry or the hieroglyphics of the ancients,
men have really succeeded in handing down those tremendous truths that
are called truisms. If the chivalric lion be red and rampant, it is
rigidly red and rampant; if the sacred ibis stands anywhere on one
leg, it stands on one leg for ever. In this language, like a large
animal alphabet, are written some of the first philosophic certainties
of men. As the child learns A for Ass or B for Bull or C for Cow, so
man has learnt here to connect the simpler and stronger creatures with
the simpler and stronger truths. That a flowing stream cannot befoul
its own fountain, and that any one who says it does is a tyrant and a
liar; that a mouse is too weak to fight a lion, but too strong for the
cords that can hold a lion; that a fox who gets most out of a flat
dish may easily get least out of a deep dish; that the crow whom the
gods forbid to sing, the gods nevertheless provide with cheese; that
when the goat insults from a mountain-top it is not the goat that
insults, but the mountain: all these are deep truths deeply graven on
the rocks wherever men have passed. It matters nothing how old they
are, or how new; they are the alphabet of humanity, which like so
many forms of primitive picture-writing employs any living symbol
in preference to man. These ancient and universal tales are all of
animals; as the latest discoveries in the oldest pre-historic caverns
are all of animals. Man, in his simpler states, always felt that he
himself was something too mysterious to be drawn. But the legend he