retouches creation, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The Court
buffoon was nothing but an attempt to lead back man to the monkey. It
was a progress the wrong way. A masterpiece in retrogression. At the
same time they tried to make a man of the monkey. Barbara, Duchess of
Cleveland and Countess of Southampton, had a marmoset for a page.
Frances Sutton, Baroness Dudley, eighth peeress in the bench of barons,
had tea served by a baboon clad in cold brocade, which her ladyship
called My Black. Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, used to go
and take her seat in Parliament in a coach with armorial bearings,
behind which stood, their muzzles stuck up in the air, three Cape
monkeys in grand livery. A Duchess of Medina-Celi, whose toilet Cardinal
Pole witnessed, had her stockings put on by an orang-outang. These
monkeys raised in the scale were a counterpoise to men brutalized and
bestialized. This promiscuousness of man and beast, desired by the
great, was especially prominent in the case of the dwarf and the dog.
The dwarf never quitted the dog, which was always bigger than himself.
The dog was the pair of the dwarf; it was as if they were coupled with a
collar. This juxtaposition is authenticated by a mass of domestic
records--notably by the portrait of Jeffrey Hudson, dwarf of Henrietta
of France, daughter of Henri IV., and wife of Charles I.

To degrade man tends to deform him. The suppression of his state was
completed by disfigurement. Certain vivisectors of that period succeeded
marvellously well in effacing from the human face the divine effigy.
Doctor Conquest, member of the Amen Street College, and judicial visitor
of the chemists' shops of London, wrote a book in Latin on this
pseudo-surgery, the processes of which he describes. If we are to
believe Justus of Carrickfergus, the inventor of this branch of surgery
was a monk named Avonmore--an Irish word signifying Great River.