Of the Docility of Beasts, and first of the Dog.
BEasts are apt to learne those things which men desire, whereby they shew them∣selves not wholy void of reason. For Dogges, Apes and Horses learne to creepe thorough the Iuglers hoopes, and rise on their hinder feet as though they would dance. Plutarch tells, that a Iugler had a Dog which would represent many things * 1.1 upon the stage befitting the occasion and argument of the play; amongst the rest, hee exceeded all admiration in that, that taking a soporificke medicine, hee excellently feigned himselfe dead; for first as taken with a giddinesse in his head he begun to tremble, then presently fell down, and lying on the ground, as it were contracted his dying members, and lastly as if truely dead he waxt stiffe; and moreover suffered himselfe diversly to be fitted according to divers parts of the Theater, the fable so requiring. But when he, by those things that were said and done, * 1.2 knew it was time to rise, he first begun to move his legs by litle and litle, as if hee had been wakened from a sound sleepe; then presently with his head a litle lifted up, hee looked this way and that way to the great admiration of all the beholders, and finally rise up and went familiarly and cheerfully to him he should; the which sight the Em∣perour Vespatian (who was then present in Marcellus his Theater) never saw any which more delighted him.