Isabel also had a menagerie. Her special forte was rescuing animals and also trying to convert the natives, of whatever religion, to her kind of Roman Catholicism. She had donkeys and a camel, turkeys, bull terriers, pye-dogs (once as many as fifty), lambs, pigeons and goats, a white Persian cat, a pet lamb, chickens, geese, guinea fowl, a panther so tame it would eat from one's hand, and, as Burton remarked, "other notions." Isabel spent many hours trying to train natural enemies to love each other, but the panther ate the lamb and chased the goats, one of which jumped into the river and drowned; the fowl ate the seeds and flowers in the garden, the cat killed the birds, and the dogs worried the cat, but Isabel noted that the survivors of the menagerie became "a really harmonious family."
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, October 03, 2018
The Wolf Also Shall Dwell with the Lamb
Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990), p. 401: