MR. LANG'S "ANIMAL STORY-BOOK." *
WE are inclined to prefer this volume to all Mr. Lang's many- coloured "Fairy Books" or "True Story-Books." Dogs and eats and elephants and monkeys, to speak only of the aris- tocracy of the animals, are far more interesting than fairies, and, for the most part, more pleasant to read about than men. Here we are introduced to a very fine company of these creatures and of their less exalted kinsfolk, such as bears, otters, weasels. Some of them are old acquaintances, the "Dog of Montargis," for instance (who was very like, by the way, to a dog of whom King Pyrrhus of Epirus had ex- perience), and the lion of Androcles. Others are new to us. We are almost ashamed to confess that the delightful creatures who shared the solitude of Alexandre Dumas pare were before unknown. If any of our readers are in the like case let them do away with the reproach at once. We warrant they will not easily find more pleasant reading than the fifty odd pages in which M. Dumas describes his family at Monte Cristo, where, as he says," without being quite like Adam in every way, I had a kind of small earthly paradise." The most important member of this family was the dog' Pritchard.' If any reader of the Spectator has from time to time permitted himself to doubt the veracity of our dog-stories, let him see what M. Dumas has to tell him of 'Pritchard.' Among other virtues, that of hospitality was conspicuous in him. He went on inviting his fellow-creatures of the same species till the maison Dumas contained thirteen. "An unlucky number," said the master of the house, when his major-domo told him of the accumula- tion. "You must see that they do not all dine together, else one of them is sure to die first." His worst vice was eating eggs ; but this Dumas was accused of teaching him, for once having dropped an egg on the floor, he called 'Pritchard' to lick it up. Once learnt, the vice was beyond cure. As Alexandre the younger said, "You may possibly make a good musician of 'Pritchard,' or a good astronomer, but he'll never be a good incubator." He seems to have acquired the art of fascinating the hens, who used to come out of their abode, and almost lay their eggs in his mouth. At the Revolution of 1848, people, says Dumas, who had been used to buy his books, "preferred to read The Guillotine, The Red Republic, and such like corrupt periodicals," and he had to disperse his establishment. His monkeys—he had three— went to the Jardin des Plantes. "I," he goes on, "had to move into a smaller house, but my monkeys were lodged in a palace ; this is a sort of thing that sometimes happens after a revolution." Pritchard,' of course, he kept till fate, in the shape of a savage retriever, overtook him. Another most admirable creature whom M. Dumas introduces to us is Tom,' M. Decamp's bear. 'Tom 'went to a fancy ball in his own char- acter, and was commonly taken for a well-known actor, M. Odry, to whom, indeed, the bill for the cakes eaten by Tom' was sent next morning. The Parisians of the time, more acute than that Greek audience which hissed off the countryman with the real pig under his arm, pronounced that the bear's growls were admirably true to nature. We have two chapters about ele- phants, but these wonderful creatures scarcely have justice done to them. The Elder Pliny tells us some marvellous stories—and this apparently of his own knowledge—about them. Two of them carried a third, representing a sick person in a litter, and another, who had been mulcted of his dinner for not spelling out a word properly, was found in his den diligently conning the alphabet. And there are modern stories • The Animal Story-Book. Edited by Andrew Lang. London : Longraane and Co.
without end, some told by Sir Emerson Tennent, who is, we see, given as an authority. But Mr. Lang will doubtless have occasion, on another year, to make amends to this, the true king of beasts, the lion being but a fraud. Is not the editor napping when, in the version of Pliny's story of the dolphin and the boy, he allows " Baianum " to stand ? Surely there was no such place. "A Baiano litore" is the original.
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