prayers as to put them for a moment beside your noble acts; but, this I know, I would rather submit to the worst of the deaths, so far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured on the pretence

of sparing me a twinge or two.  I return the paper, because I shall be probably shut up here for the next week or more, and prevented from seeing my friends: whoever would refuse to sign would certainly not be of the number.

Ever truly—and gratefully yours,
Robert Browning.

Five years later in the volume of Dramatic Idyls issued in 1879, Browning published his poem entitled “Tray” which extols the noble heroism of the dog and leaves nothing to be desired in its biting scorn of the vivisectors:

“‘Up he comes with the child, see tight
In mouth, alive too, clutched from quite
A depth of ten feet—twelve I bet!
Good dog!  What off again?  There’s yet
Another child to save?  All right!

“‘How strange we saw no other fall!
It’s instinct in the animal.
Good dog!  But he’s a long while under:
If he got drowned I should not wonder—
Strong current, that against the wall!

“‘Here he comes, holds in mouth this time
—What may the thing be?  Well, that’s prime!
Now did you ever?  Reason reigns
In man alone, since all Tray’s pains
Have fished—the child’s doll from the slime!’

“And so, amid the laughter gay,
Trotted my hero off,—old Tray,—
Till somebody, prerogatived
With reason, reasoned:—‘Why he dived
His brain would show us, I should say.

“‘John go and catch—or, if needs be
Purchase—that animal for me!
By vivisection, at expense
Of half an hour and eighteen pence
How brain secretes dog’s soul, we’ll see!’”

Here then is enough to show with what earnest conviction this poet of powerful mind and pure life condemned the practice of vivisection.  He was a man who breasted the world with a cheerful philosophy which permitted few external matters to disturb his habitual serenity.  But vivisection was one of them, and I have often heard him speak with fierce detestation of what he called “the coward Science.”

I do not think he ever addressed a public, or even private, meeting in his life, and that may have left the unlettered world unaware of his deep loathing of the cruelties of the laboratories; but he was one of the earliest Englishmen of unquestioned distinction to join the anti-vivisection movement and to

accept the office of Vice-President of our Society.

I venture to think that in aftertimes his sanguine advocacy in this great cause will not be the least of his claims to the gratitude of his fellow men.

CHAPTER V: LORD COLERIDGE
chief justice of england
vice-president of the national
anti-vivisection society

I hope that my inclusion of my father in these articles on the first supporters of the anti-vivisection movement will not be thought unbecoming.  I see no reason why I should not testify in these pages to the unswerving adhesion he brought to the cause of humaneness both towards men and women as well as towards animals, and the wise counsel he afforded to the pioneers of the fight against vivisection.

It is perhaps now long forgotten that he initiated, drafted and carried through the House of Commons when he sat in that assembly as member for Exeter a Bill emancipating married women from the cruel

conditions of servitude whereby their own earnings could legally be taken from them by their husbands.

This was the first of a series of wide-minded Acts of Parliament which established the position of women as no longer the mere chattels of their male relatives.

Cruelty to animals of any kind roused in him a deep and abiding anger: he never allowed a bearing rein to be inflicted upon his horses either in London or the country, nor was there ever a tied-up dog in his stables.

Lord Coleridge assisted in the efforts to get the Anti-Vivisection Bill of 1876 passed without the wrecking amendments that were at the last minute added to it; after the Bill was passed in its mutilated state Miss Cobbe with a not unnatural impatience wrote to him and others saying that “the supporters of vivisection having refused to accept a reasonable compromise or to permit any line to be drawn between morally justifiable painless experiments and those which are heinously cruel and

involve the torture of the most sensitive animals” she intended to endeavour to induce the Society “to condemn the practice altogether as inseparably bound up with criminal abuses”; and henceforth to adopt “the principle of uncompromising hostility to vivisection,” and she asked him to let her know whether he would give his support to her proposals.  His reply was what might have been expected from one who could not permit his irritation at the fate of the Bill to influence his parliamentary attitude.

I am afraid [he wrote] my answer must be in a sense which you will think unfavourable.  I could not commit myself out of Parliament to any view which I am not prepared to defend in it.  And the unreasonableness and what I think wrongdoing of the Medical Men would not justify me as a legislator in voting for what I think wrong merely in opposition to them or because I could not bring them to terms which I think just and right.

I do not say that this is at all necessarily the rule for a person out of Parliament, because so long as you do not agitate for what you think

wrong it is perfectly fair to agitate for more than you expect to get as a means of getting something of what you think right.  So that I find no fault whatever with any one who takes the view you take; but my position is somewhat a peculiar one and I must be cautious to an extent that some people may think coldness and weakness.  I am not afraid of your judgment however.

Six years later, in 1882, he wrote an article in the Fortnightly Review in which he definitely though reluctantly gave his adhesion to total abolition as the goal to be aimed at, but of course he never at any time associated himself with the condemnation of all other measures for the mitigation of the cruelties of the laboratory or of the world at large that has since been pronounced by the more extreme protagonists on the anti-vivisection side of the controversy.

This article dealt in a pungent severity with attacks made upon him in the Nineteenth Century by Sir James Paget, Professor Owen and Dr. Wilks.  As far as I know none of them rejoined.  They had had enough!

But the last passage of the article is of a quality that I think my readers will regard as fully justifying my reproducing it here,—I hope it will receive their endorsement—the hand that wrote it has long