ith our own hands, they licking our hands; and as to myself,
licking my miserable little face; and at one bound they re-entered upon
their natural heritage of joy. Always we took them through the fields,
where they molested nothing, and closed with giving them a cold bath in
the brook which bounded my father's property. What despair must have
possessed our dogs when they were taken back to their hateful prisons! and
I, for my part, not enduring to see their misery, slunk away when the
rechaining commenced. It was in vain to tell me that all people, who had
property out of doors to protect, chained up dogs in the same way; _this_
only proved the extent of the oppression; for a monstrous oppression it
_did_ seem, that creatures, boiling with life and the desires of life,
should be thus detained in captivity until they were set free by death.
That liberation visited poor _Grim_ and _Turk_ sooner than any of us
expected, for they were both poisoned within the year that followed by a
party of burglars. At the end of that year I was reading the AEneid; and it
struck me, who remembered the howling recusancy of _Turk_, as a peculiarly
fine circumstance, introduced amongst the horrors of Tartarus, that sudden
gleam of powerful animals, full of life and conscious rights, rebelling
against chains:--

"Iraeque leonum
Vincla recusantum."[14]

Virgil had doubtless picked up that gem in his visits at feeding-time to
the _caveae_ of the Roman amphitheatre. But the rights of brute creatures
to a merciful forbearance on the part of man, could not enter into the
feeblest conceptions of one belonging to a nation that, (although too
noble to be _wantonly_ cruel,) yet in the same amphitheatre manifested so
little regard even to human rights. Under Christianity, the condition of
the brute has improved, and will improve much more. There is ample room.
For I am sorry to say, that the commonest vice of Christian children, too
often surveyed with careless eyes by mothers, that in their _human_
relations are full of kindness, is cruelty to the inferior creatures
thrown upon their mercy. For my own part, what had formed the groundwork
of my happiness, (since joyous was my nature, though overspread with a
cloud of sadness,) had been from the first a heart overflowing with love.
And I had drunk in too profoundly the spirit of Christianity from our many
nursery readings, not to read also in its divine words the justification
of my ow