needful rest, for then he coils himself up, and
goes to sleep serenely. He has dreams, and
gives short barks in his sleep as though he
were dreaming of thieves, or strange dogs, or
disputed bones. But, to see a dog when he
is determined to be lazy, stretch himself out
at full length, with his head thrown back and
his tail quiescent, now on his side, now on his
back, with his heels upwards this is indeed
a sight good for sore-eyes. The enjoyment is
so intense, so unalloyed by any after thought
or pre-occupation, so perfect and so complete.
The ears are thrown lightly off his head. His
eyes are not quite closed—he is too lazy to do
that; but he keeps them as it were ajar, in a
lazy, winking, blinking manner, as if to intimate
that he is not tired—that he does not
want to go to sleep—that he merely wishes
to enjoy his dolce far niente like a gentleman,
and that should anything turn up in the way
of a rat-hunt, a marrow-bone, a lady, or a
fight, he will be found wide awake and ready
for action. There is a smile on his doggish
mouth that could scarcely be surpassed in
contented benignity by the smile of a child
in its sleep—save, perhaps, by that of a
young sucking-pig, ready for roasting in a
dairyman's shop-window. The mouth looks
as though it never could bark—far less bite
- least of all attack the calves of unoffending
people passing by, and kill a given number of
rats in a given number of minutes.

Next to the lazy dog I will take as a character
the comic dog. As a rule, the comic
dog is a brown dog. I have known shaggy
white dogs with a sense of the humorous, and
I have heard of sundry black dogs who
could make a joke or two, I was even once
honored with the acquaintance of a jocular
bulldog; but these are only, believe me, exceptions
to the rule, and you will find the
great majority of comic dogs to be brown.
The comic dog is moreover very nearly
always an exceedingly ugly dog. He is not a
very intellectual dog. He cannot do tricks
on the cards, walk up a ladder, jump through
a hoop, pretend to walk lame, go through the
manual exercise, halt at the word of command,
or go to market for sausages, beefsteaks,
or French rolls with halfpence in his basket.
He is not a quarrelsome dog, a vicious dog,
and I am afraid, on the other hand, he cannot
lay any very great claim to generosity or
fidelity. He is simply an irresistibly comic
dog—so comic that one wag of his preposterous
tail, one cock of his bizarre head, one
twinkle of his grotesque eyes, one wrinkle of
his egregious mouth, one wriggle of his eccentric
body, is sufficient to send you into a
prolonged and hearty roar of laughter. You
can't help it: you must laugh at the comic
dog. Moreover, he never descends to low
comedy; to unmeaning tricks of buffoonery
and tomboyism. He disdains to run round
and round after his tail, to stand on his hind
legs, and then tumble backward, to pretend
to catch flies, to bark at himself in a glass, or
to worry the cat. He is more of a humorist
than a joker. He is more of a comedian than
a farce actor. Yet he can be grave occasionally;
though in his very gravity there is
sometimes humour so broad, so shining, so
incomprehensibly ludicrous, that you must
either laugh or burst.

The melancholy—or as I had perhaps
better call him—the sad dog, is ordinarily
black. He is generally, too, a mongrel. The
fact of his obscure birth and ignoble blood
seems to haunt him and sit heavy upon him.
He had a master once, but he was unkind to
him, or ran away from him, or died, so that he
is ownerless now. He has a fragile tenure of
ownership in a few establishments, mostly
those of small tradesmen, and tries to persuade
himself that these are his masters; but
the effort is not successful. He would fain
belong to some one, but nobody will have
anything to do with him. He cares for a
great many people, but nobody cares for
him.

These circumstances have embittered the
life of the sad dog. He mopes. He is miserable.
He becomes thin. He is frequently
kicked, and dares not resent the injury. His
sides become attenuated, and his ribs show
through his lissome skin. He tries to establish
himself somewhere, to get somebody to
own him. He hides under counters in shops,
under dressers in kitchens, in remote areas and
backyards. He follows gentlemen home to
their houses at night; but nobody will have
anything to do with him. His reception is
always the same- the one irrevocable boot.
At last he subsides into an empty potatoe-basket
in Covent Garden Market, or the leeside
of a tarpaulin, and there he lies quietly,
and mopes: uncomplainingly, unresistibly,
without friends, without food, till he dies,
and has his lying-in-state in the gutter, and
his cenotaph in the dustcart. Have you
never known men and women who have been
meek and mild, uncomplaining and unresisting,
who have had neither food nor friends,
and who have gone and laid down in a corner
somewhere, and died? Shame on me! some
of you will cry, that I should compare a
Christian to a dog. Alas! not a day will
pass but we can descry human qualities in
the brute, and brute qualities in the human
being; and, alas, again, how often we find a
balance of love, fidelity, truth, generosity, on
the side of the brute!

           BACK AT TRINITY.

I AM the rector of a little parish in the
wilds of Cumberland, and have been so this
ten years; my parishioners live upon hill-sides,
and in secluded vallies, over a space of
many score square miles; but their number
is not over fifty souls: I have also just fifty
pounds a year for curing them. When I say
that my churchwarden and myself—the best
informed men in the parish, and the fountainhead