Epitaph to a Dog for shame. Ye, who behold perchance this simple urn, Pass on – it honours none you wish to mourn. To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise; I never knew but one -- and here he lies. </poem> Epitaph to a Dog "Epitaph to a Dog" (also sometimes referred to as "Inscription on the Monument to a Newfoundland Dog") is a poem by the British poet Lord Byron. It was written in 1808 in honour of his Newfoundland dog, Boatswain, who had just died of rabies. When Boatswain contracted the disease, Byron reportedly nursed him without any fear of becoming
Lad, A Dog '30s and even into the '40s." In comparing the work to popular collie character Lassie, Boyle noted that rather than having Lassie's seeming immortality, Terhune's dogs "led epic lives and they had epic deaths". In the Fall 1996 issue of "Raritan Quarterly Review", Stephen D. Cox, freely admitting to never having read the book, nonetheless called Terhune a "hack writer" who lacked "storytelling skill" and denounced "Lad: A Dog" as non-literature with "sentences [that] are insufferably stilted and hammy" and "have a tendency to wander off on long romps with his personal obsessions." Terming it a "socially interesting" work, he