If the whole body of lion anecdote, from the days of the Assyrian Kings till the last year of the nineteenth century, were collated and brought together, it would not equal in tragedy or atrocity, in savageness or in sheer insolent contempt for man, armed or unarmed, white or black, the story of these two beasts…. To what a distance the whole story carries us back, and how impossible it becomes to account for the survival of primitive man against this kind of foe!
—from The Spectator, March 3, 1900