Such susceptibility to grief is honorable, but in the monkeys, by constant indulgence, it has stereotyped a tearful expression of countenance, which even when at play is never altogether lost. Take them, for instance, when, in fun, they have tied themselves into a knot, and pretend that they cannot undo themselves. But look at the faces that peep out of the bundle of tails and paws! They might belong to orphans of an hour’s standing, so wistful and disconsolate are their eyes. Another one, peeling an orange, gazes on it with a look of such immeasurable grief as the Douglas’s features might have showed when holding the Bruce’s heart in his hand; and next to him sits an ape, sorrowfully cuffing a youngster; while overhead, surveying all the heedless throng, sits an old baboon, with a profound expression of melancholy pity on his reverend countenance, that recalls to my mind a Sunday picture-book of my early youth, and, as depicted therein, the aspect of Moses, when, from a mountain top, he sadly overlooked the Hebrews dancing round the golden calves.
Hanuman himself, saddest of monkey’s, may himself be here, for his species is a common one; and so too others of high renown. Here, looking wofully among the straw for a fallen nut, sits the very god of “mad Egypt,” the green monkey of Ethiopia, which was held in such reverence in old Memphis as the type of the God of Letters, or as Thoth himself, the emblem of the moon, symbol of the Bacchus of the Nile, and dignifying the obelisks of Luxor and the central sanctity of a hundred shrines. Yonder, musing pensively over a paper bag, still redolent of the gingerbread it once contained, sits Pthah, the pigmy baboon, the God of Learning, without whom Hermopolis would have been
