PETS. Tr is notorious even to a proverb, that the
fanciers df pets among the lower animals are liable to be attracted by qualities which are repulsive to their neighbours. Colonel Mannering was not singu- lar in that perversity of taste which made him select his favourite alianiel, Plato, on account of its ugliness. Indeed, the Colonel's family had good reason to congratulate themselves that he was satisfied with simple ugliness as a qualification in his pet. Most people who advance canine favourites to the dignity of spoiled children appear to require snappishness and bad temper in addi- tion. This it is that renders the old adage of " love me love my dog" such an infallible test of friendship : that love must indeed be strong which can extend itself to a nasty malicious cur for its master's sake.
This intellectual or moral perversity—for it partakes of both— appears to extend itself also to the choice of human pets. At least there are always persons to be found to whose favour and inveterate partisanship men appear to be beat recommended by qualities that render them public nuisances.
There, for example, Messrs. Cobden and Bright have seen fit to make—of all animals of creation—a pet of the new French Em- peror ! They get angry and abuse any one who ventures to say a word disparaging of that worthy's morality. lie has broken oaths—he has directed cannon and musketry against the citizens of Paris—he has silenced or exiled the active intellect of France —he has tallied and oorveed the whole nation to supply his pleasures and ostentatious ; yet these stern moralists, in whose balance the Duke of Wellington has been weighed and found -wanting, these ultra-economists, who would adjust national expen- diture on the scale of a rag store-shop, assert for Napoleon TTL an immunity from censure either by the press or public meetings. The unceremonious denouncers of the British aristocracy en masse are indignant if any profane tongue decries their pet Emperor. What would be unpardonable faults in others are in him merely " pretty Fanny's way," or conduct adapted to French tastes. Messrs. Cobden and Bright watch over, pamper, and protect their now pet, while all the rest of the " Liberal " world complain of him, much in the spirit of the old lady who, when her pampered lap-dog hit a piece out of a visitor's leg, exclaimed, "Poor little dear ! I hope it won't make him sick." The Times very properly takes Messrs. Bright and Cobden to task for this freakish petting of so troublesome a neighbour. Yet in the very midst of its rebuke, the Times 'betrays a disposition to sin in the same manner. It has a good word to throw in for the Austrian authorities, and a doubt to suggest as to the expe- diency of Mr. Gladstone's revelations respecting the atrocities per- petrated under the paternal rule of King Bombe. Some apology there may be found for this disposition to make pets of the most unloveable of royalties, in the bewildering effect which kingly prestige and splendour have upon the imagination. But we :find human pets selected even in the circles of private life upon the same fantastic principle. It is possible to imagine a man subjecting himself and family to the disagreeables entailed on them •by the fetid odours of a king of the vultures and his food— there is something poetical and rare about the bird: but to che- rish a commonplace nasty polecat is an inexplicable aberration of taste. Yet we find saints of the tabernacle clinging with a con- vulsive impetus of affection to some pet preacher, -whose life has been proved to be one vast succession of unehastities ; we find Irish priests chanting the praises of the bottle and vitriol extermi- nators of the Young Ireland school ; we find English artisans, otherwise intelligent, blindly worshiping a prating land-jobber, who while raising men by his harangues to mutiny, always contri- ved to keep his own person out of danger.
The class who addict themselves in domestic life to pets of the brute-creation have long been estimated at their just value, and the sound healthy judgment which has brought this about has, at the same time, purified domestic life from many other noxious ehildishnesses. In political life, common sense has not yet made so much progress; nor will it, till it becomes manly enough to despise this foolish fondling of morally ugly and troublesome pets.
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