"All his habits are gross, all his appetites are impure; his stomach is unbounded and his gluttony unparalleled," say his calumniators. Yet, in fact, he is no more unclean than most domestic beasts, any lapses in this respect being due to man and to the evil communications to which he has been subjected under domestication. The wild hog is proverbially cleanly, and is almost exclusively a vegetarian. In his natural state his courage is undaunted. The peccary will challenge the jaguar, while the wild boar is not unfrequently victorious in his combats with the tiger himself. "In this animal," says Beauvilliers, "there is almost nothing to cast aside." Without him there were, in truth, an aching void and an empty cuisine,--no lard, no hams, no bacon; no sausages, no spare-rib, no larded _filets_ and game; no truffles and scientifically blended _pâtés_; no souse or headcheese; no "Dissertation on Roast Pig"; no chine "with rising bristles roughly spread." His ways are ways of fatness, and all his paths are progressive. He not only seeks to instruct, like Virgil; but seeks to please, like Theocritus. Civilisation radiates from him as light from a prism. With his increase culture advances, wealth accumulates, and cookery improves. And think of the services of his ploughshare to the farmer, whose orchards in many cases would otherwise remain untilled! His unctuous Lardship! the very fat and marrow of the stock-exchange, the grease of the commercial wheel. Did he not directly furnish the inspiration to Dubufe for one of the grandest paintings the world has produced--the "Return of the Prodigal Son" who shared his husks--to say nothing of Hogarth and the Scottish poet Hogg, whose ode "To a Skylark" is scarcely excelled by Shelley's, and whose "Kilmeny" is enduring among poetic strains? And what were the spirited hunting scenes of Weenix, Sneyders, and Oudry without the great wild boar? In the fourth canto of "The Faerie Queene" he is pictured as the symbol of gluttony: "And by his side rode loathsome Gluttony, Deformèd creature on a filthy swine. His belly was upblown with luxury, And eke with fatness swollen was his eyne. Full of diseases was his carcass blew, And a dry Dropsie through his flesh did flow, Which by misdiet daily greater grew; Such one was Gluttony, the second of that crew."