efoucault._ Certainly not: how should dogs calculate?

_La Fontaine._ I know nothing of the process. I am unable to inform
you how they leap over hedges and brooks, with exertion just
sufficient, and no more. In regard to honour and a sense of dignity,
let me tell you, a dog accepts the subsidies of his friends, but never
claims them: a dog would not take the field to obtain power for a son,
but would leave the son to obtain it by his own activity and prowess.
He conducts his visitor or inmate out a-hunting, and makes a present
of the game to him as freely as an emperor to an elector. Fond as he
is of slumber, which is indeed one of the pleasantest and best things
in the universe, particularly after dinner, he shakes it off as
willingly as he would a gadfly, in order to defend his master from
theft or violence. Let the robber or assailant speak as courteously
as he may, he waives your diplomatical terms, gives his reasons in
plain language, and makes war. I could say many other things to his
advantage; but I never was malicious, and would rather let both
parties plead for themselves; give me the dog, however.

_Rochefoucault._ Faith! I will give you both, and never boast of my
largess in so doing.

_La Fontaine._ I trust I have removed from you the suspicion of
selfishness in my client, and I feel it quite as easy to make a
properer disposal of another ill attribute, namely cruelty, which we
vainly try to shuffle off our own shoulders upon others, by employing
the offensive and most unjust term, brutality. But to convince you of
my impartiality, now I have defended the dog from the first obloquy, I
will defend the man from the last, hoping to make you think better of
each. What you attribute to cruelty, both while we are children and
afterward, may be assigned, for the greater part, to curiosity.
Cruelty tends to the extinction of life, the dissolution of matter,
the imprisonment and sepulture of truth; and if it were our ruling and
chief propensity, the human race would have been extinguished in a few
centuries after its appearance. Curiosity, in its primary sense,
implies care and consideration.

_Rochefoucault._ Words often deflect from their primary sense. We find
the most curious men the most idle and silly, the least observant and
conservative.

_La Fontaine._ So we think; because we see every hour the idly
curious, and not the strenuously; we see only the persons of the one
set, and only the works of the ot