I have said Carlo is positively burdened with refinement. You cannot look at him without suspecting what a weight the vulgar world is on his mind. It does not enrage him; he is too mildly superior for that. Rage is more or less of a brutal quality, and Carlo is as little of a savage brute as any four-footed creature ever was. The wilful low life and rude practices of the mass of living beings simply depress his not very strong spirits, and torture his keen sensibilities. He is often rendered wretched by the mere coarseness of the world in general; and this wretchedness bulks so largely in his excited imagination that his peculiar trial shuts out from him every other dog’s trial. Carlo has fared delicately all his days. He has never known what it is to want food and shelter; the best and most suitable of everything has been provided sedulously for his use by the men whose business it is to wait upon him, instead of his having had to hunt hard to satisfy his most pressing wants, and to submit to being hunted in turn, kicked and abused for presuming to have wants, and for seeking to satisfy them. He has hardly ever heard a rough word addressed to him, so that he will mope for hours if he is merely overlooked—if his master has not smiled upon him, stroked his head, taken in his hand one fine paw after the other. Naturally, Carlo has little sympathy to spare from his own sentimental woes, which he plaintively airs and nurses, for the matter-of-fact miseries of homeless dogs, starved, beaten, done to death for the idle amusement of the spectators. Yet Carlo is a gentle, generous dog, by natural temperament, and, so far from having no feelings, his feelings are only of too fine a description. The truth is, there is a subtle—all the more serious—danger to moral character in exquisitely fine feelings, especially when they accompany a morbidly fastidious taste and effeminate habits. When I say effeminate habits, I wish not to be mistaken. I do not mean that Carlo was a larger lap-dog, utterly idle and useless—that he sat and lay all day and all night in that luxurious study, or in a still more luxurious drawing-room, or in a kennel very little behind the two rooms in comfort and beauty. On the contrary, he saw plenty of sun and wind. He had been trained, like his master, to count as the best part of his time those hours which were spent in the open air, and in active exercise. Coursing was exactly to Carlo what stalking deer, riding to hounds, and rowing a boat were to his master. When the dog’s blood and breeding were up, he could make a good fight in his doggish sport.