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I have to thank the public and my own special craft cordially and much for their reception of these Idle Hours – Brown Studies, as a friendly wag calls them – and above all, for their taking to their hearts that great old dog and his dead friends, – for all which the one friend who survives thanks them. There is no harm and some good in letting our sympathy and affection go forth without stint on such objects, dead and homely though they be.

When I think of that noble head, with its look and eye of boundless affection and pluck, simplicity and single-heartedness, I feel what it would be for us, who call ourselves the higher animals, to be in our ways as simple, affectionate, and true, as that old mastiff; and in the highest of all senses, I often think of what Robert Burns says somewhere, “Man is the god of the dog.” It would be well for man if his worship were as immediate and instinctive – as absolute as the dog’s. Did we serve our God with half the zeal Rab served his, we might trust to sleep as peacefully in our graves as he does in his. When James turned his angry eye and raised his quick voice and foot, his worshipper slunk away, humbled and afraid, angry with himself for making him angry; anxious by any means to crouch back into his favor, and a kind look or word. Is that the way we take His displeasure, even when we can’t think, as Rab couldn’t, we were immediately to blame? It is, as the old worthy says, something to trust our God in the dark, as the dog does his.

A dear and wise and exquisite child, drew a plan for a headstone on the grave of a favorite terrier, and she had in it the words “WHO died” on such a day; the older and more worldly-minded painter put in “WHICH;” and my friend and “Bossy’s” said to me, with some displeasure, as we were examining the monuments, “Wasn’t he a Who as much as they?” and wasn’t she righter than they? and

“Quis desiderio sit aut pudor aut modus

Tam cari capitis” —

as that of “Rab.”

With regard to the quotations – and the much Latin and some Greek, the world of men, and especially of women, is dead against me. I am sorry for it. As he said, who was reminded in an argument that the facts were against him, “So much the worse for them,” and I may add for me. Latin and Greek are not dead – in one sense, they are happily immortal; but the present age is doing its worst to kill them, and much of their own best good and pleasure.

23, Rutland Street,

October 13, 1859.