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
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. For the ideal of the dog is feudal and religious; 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