Thou busy labourer! one resemblance more May yet the verse prolong, For, spider, thou art like the poet poor, Whom thou hast helped in song. Both busily our needful food to win We work as Nature taught, with ceaseless pains, Thy bowels thou dost spin, I spin my brains. You remember that the pertinacity with which a spider renewed his exertions after failing six times to fix his net, roused Bruce to perseverance and success. Cackling geese saved Rome, and Caligula shod his favourite horse with gold and nominated him for vice consul, as he considered him vastly superior to the men who aspired to that honourable position. Virgil amused his leisure hours with a gnat. Homer made pets of frogs and mice. The horse has been dearly loved by many famous people who have not been ashamed to own it. Mr. Everett once told a pathetic anecdote of Edmund Burke, that “in the decline of his life, when living in retirement on his farm at Beaconsfield, the rumour went up to London that he had gone mad and went round his park kissing his cows and horses. His only son had died not long before, leaving a petted horse which had been turned into the park and treated as a privileged favourite. Mr. Burke in his morning walks would often stop to caress the favourite animal. On one occasion the horse recognised Mr. Burke from a distance, and coming nearer and nearer, eyed him with the most pleading look of recognition, and said as plainly as words could have said, ‘I have lost him too!’ and then the poor dumb beast deliberately laid his head upon Mr. Burke’s bosom. Overwhelmed by the tenderness of the animal, expressed in the mute eloquence of holy Nature’s universal language, the illustrious statesman for a moment lost his self-possession and clasping his arms around his son’s favourite animal, lifted up that voice which had caused the arches of Westminster Hall to echo the noblest strains that sounded within them, and wept aloud. Burke is gone; but, sir, so hold me Heaven, if I were called upon to designate the event or the period in Burke’s life that would best sustain a charge of insanity, it would not be when, in a gush of the holiest and purest feeling that ever stirred the human heart, he wept aloud on the neck of a dead son’s favourite horse.” Lord Erskine composed some lines to the memory of a beloved pony, Jack, who had carried him on the home circuit when he was first called to the bar, and could not afford any more sumptuous mode of travelling: