96 "THE CA VALIER'S PETS."
liver-coloured mastiff, the fierce white bull-dog, the hideous
crooked-legged turnspit, the hardly less ugly, long-bodied,
pig-headed boar-hound, the Pomeranian, with its sleek hair
and fox's head, and the little cocker, with its indescribably
comical, crushed-up nose.
 The origin of some of these manias must have been
whimsical enough; but our concern is with the fact that in
the reign of the first Charles there became prominent as pets
in England a race of small dogs known as the King Charles
spaniel, and that at a later period the Blenheim spaniel came
into notice. Both races were and are aristocrats of the first
water, connected in the very names of the species with royal
and ducal houses.
 I speak as an ignorant woman; but my impression is, that
the King Charles is of French nationality, and that the little
brute not only came to England in the train of pretty, foolish,
flighty Henrietta Maria, but that it made its appearance in
Scotland two generations earlier, in the suite of the beautiful
and miserable Mary Stewart. Unless tradition lie, such a
dog crept beside the block at Fotheringay-
" The little dog that licked her hand, the last of all the crowd
Which sunned themselves beneath her glance, and round her footsteps bowed."

 King Charles spaniels were at a premium in England in
the reigns of the two sovereigns of that name. I don't doubt
that they were under a cloud during the Protectorate, and that
stout Oliver Cromwell owned none of them; but we find one
in the study of Sir Isaac Newton, in its ignorant unconscious-
ness working dire mischief among the philosopher's priceless
calculations, and drawing down on its empty head the mildest