Popular Culture Review Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter 2014 | Page 90

86 Popular Culture Review specific dog interred in the tomb; these lines, however, do not praise the dog as much as elevate the species to inhabit a space in which they can be considered friends. According to the inscription, while dogs may exhibit the virtues praised earlier in general terms, this dog can with certainty claim only friendship, which is only possible in the context of relationship with another.^ This is the height to which humanity at its finest aspires, and to which Byron denies the title, friend. It is only the dog, now dead, for whom the inscription arises, that can be called friend. This irreplaceably singular dog is now dead and waiting, first to welcome his master. The inscription mourns, perhaps above all, the relationship, friendship, that has neither ceased to exist nor can be substituted. The act of attempted memorial creates a space of perhaps involuntary mourning in which friendship is preserved with the illusion of lasting. This animemorial reflects the inability to assimilate the decaying dog that cannot then move into memory.* It is right to say that a portion of the author has died with the dog—perhaps the heart that is “his master’s own.” If Byron’s epitaph was in any way ironic, as might be suspected given his frequent adoption of this tone, he sets the idea to rest in a will executed in 1811. Describing the will to be drawn in an 1811 letter, “Directions for the Contents of a Will to be Drawn up Immediately,” Byron directs that: The body of Lord B. to be buried in the vault of the garden of Newstead, without any ceremony or burial-service whatever, or any inscription, save his name and age. His dog not to be removed from the said vault. (Moore 131) In legal tone, the will documents demand that the interred fnend will not rest alone. The corpse of the master would not be far behind.’ Nearly three years after his dog’s death, Byron still inhabited the space of friendship preserved by the memorial. That fnendship lasts beyond death is certainly an idea adopted during the Romantic period; that the memorial of a dead beast, confronting the living, might preserve the space for interspecies friendship appears to be a nineteenth-century phenomenon, but it is eertainly one that has carried forward and that has shaped our understanding of the place of animals in the twenty-first century.* It would be remiss, however, to ignore the connection to the terrifying outbreaks of rabies plaguing the nineteenth-century, to which