Page:Curious myths of the Middle Ages (1876).djvu/161

 All Litanys in this have wanted faith, There’s no—Deliver us from a Bishop’s wrath. Never shall Calvin pardon’d be for sales, Never for Burnet’s sake, the Lauderdales; For Becket’s sake, Kent always shall have tails.” Bailey in his Dictionary, under the head of “Kentish longtails,” endeavours to shift the charge to Dorsetshire; and Lambarde, in his “Perambulation of Kent,” is equally sensitive on the subject. Vieyra, the famous Portuguese preacher, says that Satan was tail-less till his fall, when that appendage grew to him “as an outward and visible token that he had lost the rank of an angel, and was fallen to the level of a brute .”

It may be remembered that Lord Monboddo, a Scotch judge of last century, and a philosopher of some repute, though of great eccentricity, stoutly maintained the theory that man ought to have a tail, that the tail is a desideratum, and that the abrupt termination of the spine without caudal elongation is a sad blemish in the origination of man. The tail, the point in which man is inferior to the brute, what a delicate index of the mind it is! how it expresses the passions of love and hate, how nicely it gives token of the feelings of joy or