[ Coleridge / The Friend ]
Coleridge is widely recognized as one of the major cultural figures of the British Romantic Period in literature (roughly 1780 - 1835). He made his early reputation as a poet and radical political thinker, though he increasingly turned to the essay as his principal form of expression as his political and religious views became ever more conservative as he grew older.
The Friend began in 1809 as "A Literary, Moral, and Political Weekly Paper." Its contents were written almost entirely by Coleridge, whose business skills were, notoriously, as deficient as his ability to stick with large projects, thanks in part to his opium addiction. His abstruse and philosophical essays were probably close to unintelligble to the average reader, and The Friend lasted less than a year, though the essays were collected and published in book form, and this collection was republished and expanded several times. The text below is taken from the 1906 edition (London: George Bell).
In an essay ("The Landing Place, Essay #5") discussing the nature of understanding and reason, and how those exist in humans but not in "lower" animals, Coleridge offers two dog-related anecdotes which, for him, demonstrate the existence of "understanding and experience," though not reason, in animals. The first concerns a poodle which not only helped hatch some chicken eggs but later guarded the chicks; the second concerns a Newfoundland:
I have myself known a Newfoundland dog who watched and guarded a family of young children with all the intelligence of a nurse, during their walks. (102, footnote)