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Washington, United States
loves: you win if you guessed "pets" and "museums". Also books, art history, travel, British punk, Korean kimchi, bindis, martinis, and other things TBD. I will always make it very clear if a post is sponsored in any way. Drop me a line at thepetmuseum AT gmail.com !

Thursday, October 16, 2014

on dogs, particularly those wiry-haired aliens

In which some literary gent has a lot to say about those accessory-sized doglets (see, it's not a modern thing to have a tiny dog in your purse):
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...the whole variety of French Shocks, and family and single Lap-dogs are obnoxious to my high opinions of dogs in general. I can never feel any thing but a bitter biped indignation when I see a wealthy and wellinformed woman lavishing that fondness on those ugly quadrupeds, who are thought handsome, which if bestowed on some little friendless orphan, whom they might comfort at less expense, and adopt and keep at little more than is wasted on those wiry-haired aliens. When I meet one of these fat and pampered animals waddling and wheezing it's panting way after it‘s fashionable mistress, l am much perplexed which to despise; but as I venerate all petticoats, I usually satisfy my spleen with despising the dog instead of his mistress. And when I have seen a tall manly fellow of a lady's lacquey hoisting one of these white enormities under his arm, and dogging the heels of his superior, I have felt something like indignation, that even a man in a livery should be degraded to so vile and unmanly an office. But when I have met, in the Mall some fair spinster hugging one of these monstrous affection-stealers to her fair bosom, I have, at the moment, wished myself bitten by a mad dog, that l might run about the Parks and polite places in an unsuspicious shape, and bite every dog’s tail that was caught dangling down from the dexter bend of a fair spinster’s elbows...
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Original spelling and punctuation kept, as usual.  "Lacquey" - lackey; "dexter" - left side.  A "shock dog" is a very bushy-haired one.  From "On Dogs" from The New European Magazine, published in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Volume 1 (London: 1823), p. 72.

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