give the patronage of our countenance to all sorts of rascality--have been
forced to support robbery, swindling, extortion--but it won't do to think
of--give me the pot. Oh! dear, it had suited better with my conscience, had
I been doomed to draw a sand-cart!

LION.--Come, come, no unseemly affectation. _You_, at the best, are only a
fiction--a quadruped lie.

UNICORN.--I know naturalists dispute my existence, but if, as you unkindly
say, I am only a fiction, why should I have been selected as a supporter of
the royal arms?

LION.--Why, you fool, for that very reason. Have you been where you are for
so many years, and yet don't know that often, in state matters, the greater
the lie the greater the support?

UNICORN.--Right. When I reflect--I have greater doubts of my truth, seeing
where I am.

LION.--But here am I, in myself a positive majesty, degraded into a
petty-larceny scoundrel; yes, all my inherent attributes compromised by my
position. Oh, Hercules! when I remember my native Africa--when I reflect on
the sweet intoxication of my former liberty--the excitement of the
chase--the mad triumph of my spring, cracking the back of a bison with one
fillip of my paw--when I think of these things--of my tawny wife with her
smile sweetly ferocious, her breath balmy with new blood--of my playful
little ones, with eyes of topaz and claws of pearl--when I think of all
this, and feel that here I am, a damned rabbit-sucker--

UNICORN.--Don't swear.