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Ithaca. John Hoskins writes "Encomologicall Antispasticks to "the only true travelling Porcupen of England." Campion in Latin: "Itinerossimi Montiscandentissimique Peditis, Thomae Coryati . . . Encomiasticon": William Fenton, the translator of Bandello and Guicciardini, in a language only known to himself. William Baker: "The anatomie, dissection or cutting up of that great quack-salver of words, Mr. Thomas Coryate, our British Mercurie." And another, upon this unmatched worke, the true hiereglyphicke of that observative and long-winded gentleman, Thomas Coryate." Glareanus Vadianus begins, “ Arma virumque cano." John Chapman and Inigo Jones make rare and punster's play with Coryat's home: "Our Odde Author hath Comb'd the fertile pate of his knowledge" and "Odde is the combe from whence this Cocke did come.” This is not a tithe even of the titles of an antic rout of Holofernesque, Armadoan verses, in praise of “the most Axiopisticall Hodaepory" of our gratified, if bewildered pilgrim. Can we not see a convulsed Court crowning the exultant Tom as the Tenth and most "autarkesticall " of the Worthies ?

The moral? It is certainly an odd, Brobdingnagian fashion of having your joke. But, outside Falstaff, it is the only Rabelaisian form of jest that exists in the language. In their queer academic deportment these Roaring Boys of learned verse do manifest a passion for language and for literature which, behind all its faults and pedantries, is the mark and seal of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age. Even the recondite element shows a zest of pursuit into the crazier corridors of expression. To my mind it is not mere fantasy to seek an analogy between

these boisterous cocktails to the " Crudities "—and Henry James, the great modern, who, above all others, has testified most intimately to the literary devotion, the religion of literature. In the same way the prefatory poem itself is a witness to the community and brotherhood of artists and so a filial ritual to the motherhood of art. That, if I am compelled to a moral, is the text of it.

XII

SAGO

MY DEAR X,

I am a second-hand writer, but there is nobody else to celebrate him. So here in commendation of the praise-transcending, the right-worshipful and ever-to-belauded, the no less grave than agile, the more spirit than animal, in praise of the quintessence of all Dogs-Goodman Sago.

In your interstellar regions dogs of course, qua dogs (pardon my Oxford manner), do not exist. They are bright intelligencies, emblems in fact rather than substances of caninism. So you may be glad to hear something of my dog, corporeally considered. His name is, as I told you, Sago-Honest Sago, because in something I once wrote the printer, with radiant inspiration, had metamorphosed "Iago " into that form. He is smallish (like the ginger-bread nuts at Dawlish); of a rufous or rather burnt Sienna dye with iridescent high-lights upon it; hair on the short side but of a satin texture and consistency; pert little ears; a long mouth with one lip a trifle curled in a semi-ironical estimate of his microcosm; an Elizabethan ruff round his neck; forehead frequently puckered with thought; a straight, blunt little tail, merely downy as far as the tip, when it violently ex

foliates into a thick drooping plume of creamy hairs. In comparative repose, these hairs behave plumishly; in periods of exhilaration the tail arches over the back, the hairs execute a spontaneous parting in the middle and spreadeagle themselves stiffly at different angles to the parting. His eyes are as liquid, as luminous and sentimental as those of the most approved Joshua Reynolds spaniels; he possesses two front legs à la Chippendale and two back ones which appear to be set too far apart and to straggle behind his body. I judge him to be a cross between a Ruby spaniel and a terrier.

Sago is as comprehensively useless as beauty and as parasitic as affection. Human companionship is the alpha and omega of his existence. Joseph, the brindled medley between a bull-dog and a wolf-hound and really the embodiment of a bland, respectable and middle-aged gentleman, he treats indulgently but also tartly. He prefers him quiescent in front of the fire, to active away from it, as a cushion rather than as a comrade, so that he may slide himself down half upon his shoulder and half between his paws. He has never caught a rabbit or even a fly. He is in fact almost a vegetarian-tangerines, dates, bananas, figs, prunes, grapes, beans (preferably broad), peas, cucumber, nuts (which he cracks himself), beetroot, coal, lettuces, ginger and potatoes being to his taste as edible as meat or grape-nuts. When he barks at the xenos it is partly as an instinctive tribute to the conventional forms of wardenship, but partly out of an æsthetic pleasure in measuring the elaborate variety of his notes. Baritone and altissimo are equally at his command. He appears to have consciously developed this language of sound, his repertory being not only copious

but significant-designed both to make his needs and emotions coherent and intelligible to himself and to communicate them (in all their differences) to me. Boots, huge stones, paper, kettle-holders, waste-paper baskets, foot-stools, loofahs, candles, duodecimos, paint brushes, branches with leaves on them and cushions are his natural prey. Sparrows particularly exasperate him. His natural chastity dislikes them. He desires not to kill but to fluster them, and partly of course to seize the opportunity of being officious. He has been taught none of the abominations of equilibrist feats-begging on his hind legs and presenting both his hands to his fosterfather of his own volition and as a ready concession to the human attitude about dogs. Being self-instructed, he begs in any position, sitting sideways perhaps for ten minutes on his rump without inconvenience and, in his observation of other objects, forgetting after a while the original purpose of his solicitation. Nor does he beg merely for loofahs nor beetroot nor for recreation with his human parent nor to attract attention to himself, nor even from vanity, but frequently just out of courtesy. He is inclined to keep late hours, being usually at his briskest from twelve to one in the morning. Like the giant to whom he has attached himself, he prefers to sleep with coverings over him, being often discovered in the morning lying beneath the sheets and the blankets in the neighbourhood of the giant's feet. So in the spasmodic intervals of rest between his multiple activities in the daytime he prefers chairs, desks, tables and the back of my neck and shoulders to the floor.

Yet as a metaphysician, and in spite of a certain hypersensitiveness, he is one of the quietists. When he is

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