and adoring demonstrations? I lived, I tell
you, for a month in Snobston  Priors. From
that hour, there is no subscription or
testimonial for any object, or any man, which is
not submitted to my good feeling as an old
inhabitant of the village. The same with
Stoke Slavers—the same with Bath; and
now it is growing the custom, I am happy
to say, to localise London, and give
testimonials as letters are delivered, according
to districts. If Pimlico, W., has its
portrait, why shouldn't Whitechapel, E., have
its ornamented pipe and backy-box? Yes;
these are great national efforts for the
discovery and reward of the men who do
honour to their country. The time is not far
distant when there will be as many statues
as men in London; when for every medal of
honour in the Rue de Rivoli there will be
testimonial walking-sticks and silver
spectacles in the Strand; when a man's daily
life will be through a succession of gratifying
tokens of regard; when he will pour his tea
from a testimonial pot, swallow his soup from
a testimonial spoon, drink testimonial rum-
punch from a testimonial bowl, stagger up
stairs in his testimonial slippers, and snore—
gratified yet oblivious—in his testimonial
nightcap.

WOLVES.

"GIVE a dog an ill name,"—we know the
proverb. Well, you can't call him anything
worse than a wolf; a name which is, indeed,
his own—in Latin—the genus Canis
comprising a tolerably wide range of the
carnivorous mammalia, from the little King
Charles in your wife's work-basket to the
prowling hyæna in the Libyan waste. The
wolf and the dog belong to the same family.
The close resemblance between their general
anatomy; their mutual proneness to go mad;
and the ridiculous blindness which affects them
on entering the world, and which terminates
simultaneously in each, establish a popular
as well as a scientific identity.

Morally, however, the two animals are as
distinct as possible. The dog is the Tom
Jones of the canine world; the wolf its
Blifil, with ferocity superadded. Buffon, who
sometimes allows his antipathies to get the
better of his philosophy, calls the wolf a felon
animal: a brute capable of committing the most
cowardly crimes, such as frightening children
to death and eating them afterwards; or
following a tired horse till he drops, and then
remorselessly dining on the unresisting
carcase. I, too, may be prejudiced, without
being a philosopher; but I confess that I
agree with Buffon; who observes in another
place: " There is nothing good in the
wolf; he has a base, low look, a savage
aspect, a terrible voice, an insupportable
smell, a nature brutal and ferocious, and a
body so foul and unclean that no animal or
reptile will touch his flesh. It is only a wolf
that can eat a wolf." This opinion is
endorsed by Cuvier, who gives the wolf his
coup de grace : " No animal," he declares,
" so richly merits destruction as a wolf." He
is, in fact, the Ishmael of the carnivora.

"The aspect of the wolf," says a recent
French writer, a sportsman in the district of
Le Morvan, in the middle of France, "has
in it something sinister and terrible, which
his sanguinary and brutal disposition does
not bely. His head is large, his eyes sparkle
with a diabolical and cannibal look, and in
the night seem to burn like two yellow
golden flames." This lurid light, in all
probability, suggested the belief in a strange
beast which William Finch, merchant, who,
in sixteen hundred and seven, set down his
Observations on Sierra Leone, says is found
in the neighbourhood of that settlement.
"The negroes told us," he says, " of a strange
beast " (which the interpreter called a
Carbuncle) " oft seene, yet only by night; having
a stone in his forehead incredibly shining,
and giving him light to feed, attentive to the
least noyse, which he no sooner heareth but
he presently covereth up the same with a
filme or skinne, given him as a naturall
covering, that his splendour betray him not."
To continue the description of the wolf proper.
It is omnivorous; but so, indeed, are they all.
"He attacks," says the above sportsman,
"not only cows, oxen, horses, sheep, goats and
pigs, but also fowls and turkeys, and especially
geese, for which he has a great fancy" (trenching
here on the rights of the fox), " game,
fawns, roe-bucks, and even wild boars."
D'Aubenton affirms that the wolf eats frogs. We
know, from Shaw and others, that he stays his
stomach with mud; and it would not
surprise me to hear that he dined occasionally
on whelks and winkles, if he only knew how
to get at them. Not that he is devoid of
ingenuity, if we are to believe what is told of
one of the family, as it is narrated in a
Report of the African Kingdom of Congo,
gathered by Philippo Pigafetta, out of the
Discourses of Master Edward Lopez, a
Portugall, translated out of Italian into
English, by Master Abraham Hartwell, and
here abbreviated. Senhor Lopez vouches for
the following: " There are wolves also which
love the oyle of palmes " (a love not unknown
to some men, as Mr. Coppock,
perhaps, can testify) "beyond all measure.
They will smell this oyle afarre off, and
steale it in the night time out of their " (the
negroes') " houses of straw, and sometimes
from those that carrie it by the way, whiles
the poore soules doe rest themselves and
sleepe. The oyle is made of the palm-tree;
it is thicke and hard, like butter. And it is
a marvell to see " (I should think so) " how
these wolves doe take a bottle that is full of
this liquor between their teeth, and so cast it
on their shoulders, and runne away withall,
as our wolves here doe with a sheepe." It
would have been an agreeable pendant to