and nations, or the badges of the Apostles. But no one uses the tiger in this way as a metaphor. There is not sufficiently subtlety in the emblem. It is too coarse, too downright. A tiger is a tiger, and nothing more or less. Once only it was made a royal emblem, — by Tippoo, the Sultan of Mysore, — but then professedly out of mere brutal ferocity. In the same vein that amiable prince constructed a mechanical toy, now in the South Kensington collection, which represented a tiger, life-size, mumbling the body of an English soldier; and when the machinery was in proper order, the tiger growled and the soldier groaned with considerable power. But Mr. John Bright, so they say, finding time heavy on his hands during the Sultan’s ball, amused himself with Tippoo’s toy, and by overwinding the machine, broke it. At any rate, the tiger goes through his growling performances now in a very perfunctory and feeble manner.
For the same reason, namely, that the tiger affords no room for the play of fancy, the poets prefer leopards to tigers. There is more left to the imagination in the sound of the smaller animal’s name, and as it is not so well known as the tiger, they have wider margin for poetical license. The moralist, for a similar reason, avoids the tiger, for no amount of ingenuity will extract a moral out of its conduct.
In short, then, the tiger may be taken as the supreme type of the pure wild beast. Life has only one end for him — enjoyment; and to this he gives all his magnificent energies. Endowed with superb capabilities, he exercises them to the utmost in this one direction, without ever forgetting for an instant that he is only a huge cat, or flying in the face of Nature by pretending to be anything else.
