Henry James acquired his Max in spring 1903, when he was living in London in a letter to a friend he describes his new dog as "hideously expensive. While walking Kaiser in Hyde Park, Matthew Arnold may very well have run into the American author Henry James walking his dog, Tosca, a small terrier, who, when she died in 1899, was succeeded by a dachshund named Max (always popular, the name has become increasingly common since the nineteenth century, and for the last thirty years has been the number one name for male dogs). Predictably, scholars usually dismiss these late elegies as a mawkish and regrettable descent into sentimental "animal verse", best overlooked, perhaps better forgotten. Kaiser died in 1887, and was commemorated in a poem, as was his predecessor Geist, who lived only four years. In the mid-1880s, the British poet Matthew Arnold returned home from work every lunchtime to take his dachshund Kaiser for a constitutional in Hyde Park, since "he quite expects it, and is the best of boys".
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