The dragon, like the griffin, is oftentimes the fabled guardian of treasure : we see this not only in the classic story of the garden of the Hesperides, but more especially. in the tales of Eastern origin. Any of our readers who have duly gone through much of the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments " will scarcely have failed to notice the employment of the dragon as a defender of gold and other hoarded wealth. Guillim, in his quaint
book on heraldry, says that these treasures are committed to their charge "because of their admirable sharpness of sight, and for that they are supposed of all other living things to be the most valiant." He goes on to add that "they are naturally so hot that they cannot be cooled by drinking of water, but still gape for the air to refresh them, as appeareth in Jeremiah xiv. 6, where it saith that the ` wild asses did stand in the high places, they snuffed up the wind like dragons." Any one who has been in any mountainous district in hot weather will no doubt have noticed the cattle fringing the ridges of the hills like a row of sentinels. When we first observed this, and wondered at it, in North Wales, we were at once told that it was a regular habit of the creatures, that they did it partly to avoid the plague of flies that haunted the lower levels and the woodlands, but more especially to get the benefit of any breeze that might be stirring. While Guillim is willing to admit that even a dragon can render valuable service to those who are so fortunate as to be able to procure his kind offices, and induce him to play the part of watchdog, he very properly regards him, and such like monsters, as something decidedly uncanny. "Another sort there is," he says, "of exorbitant Animals much more prodigious than all the former. Such are those creatures formed, or rather deformed, with the confused shapes of creatures of different kinds and qualities. These monsters (saith St. Augustine) cannot be reckoned amongst those good Creatures that God created before the transgression of Adam, for those did God, when He took the survey of them, pronounce to be valde bona, for they had in them neither excess nor defect, but were the perfect workmanship of God's creation. If man had not transgressed the Law of his Maker this dreadful deformity (in likelihood) had not
happened in the creation of aminals which some Philosophers do call Peccata Naturce."
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