Those tones which purl and percolate
Deep down into my shadowy soul,
Exalt me like a fine tune’s roll,
And yield the joy love philters make.
There is no note in the world,
Nor perfect instrument I know,
Can lift my heart to such a glow
And set its vibrant chord in whirl,
As thy rich voice mysterious.
Champfleury, another French writer, has recorded that, visiting Victor
Hugo once, he found, in a room decorated with tapestries and Gothic
furniture, a cat enthroned on a dais, and apparently receiving the
homage of the company. Sainte-Beuve’s cat sat on his desk, and walked
freely over his critical essays. “I value in the cat,” says
Chateaubriand, “that indifferent and almost ungrateful temper which
prevents itself from attaching itself to any one; the indifference with
which it passes from the _salon_ to the housetop.” Marshal Turenne
amused himself for hours in playing with his kittens. The great general,
Lord Heathfield, would often appear on the walls of Gibraltar at the
time of the famous siege, attended by his favourite cats. Montaigne
wrote: “When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her
more sport than she makes me? We mutually divert each other with our
play. If I have my hour to begin or refuse, so has she.” As George Eliot
puts it, “Who can tell what just criticisms the cat may be passing on us
beings of wider speculation?” Chateaubriand’s cat Micette is well known.
He used to stroke her tail, to notify Madame Récamier that he was tired
or bored.
Cats and their friendships are not spoken of in the Bible. But they are
mentioned in Sanskrit writing two thousand years old, and, as has been
said before, they were household pets and almost idols with the
Egyptians, who mummied them in company with kings and princes. They were
also favourites in India and Persia, and can claim relationship with the
royal felines of the tropics. Simonides, in his Satire on Women, the
earliest extant, sets it down that froward women were made from cats,
just as most virtuous, industrious matrons were developed from beer. In
Mills’s History of the Crusades the cat was an important personage in
religious festivals. At Aix, in Provence, the finest he cat was wrapped
like a child in swaddling clothes and exhibited in a magnificent shrine:
every knee bent, every hand strewed flowers.
Several cats have been immortalized by panegyrics and epitaphs from
famous masters. Joachim de Bellay has left this pretty tribute:
C’est Beland, mon petit chat gris—
Beland, qui fut peraventure
Le plus bel œuvre que nature
Fit onc en matière de chats.
The pensive Selima, owned by Walpole, was mourned by Gray, and from the
Elegy we get the favourite aphorism, “A favourite has no friends.”
Arnold mourned the great Atossa. One of Tasso’s best sonnets was
addressed to his favourite cat. Cats figure in literature from Gammer
Gurton’s Needle to our own day. Shakespeare mentions the cat forty-four
times—“the harmless, necessary cat,” etc. Goldsmith wrote:
Around in sympathetic mirth
Its tricks the kitten tries;
The cricket chirrups in the hearth,
The crackling fagot flies.
Joanna Baillie wrote in the same strain.
In one of Gay’s fables about animals the cat is asked what she can do to
benefit the proposed confederation. She answers scornfully:
... These teeth, these claws,
With vigilance shall serve the cause.
The mouse destroyed by my pursuit
No longer shall your feasts pollute,
Nor eat, from nightly ambuscade
With watchful teeth your stores invade.
The story of Dick Whittington and his cat is doubtless true. All the
pictorial and architectural relics of Whittington represent him with the
cat—a black and white cat—at his left hand, or his hand resting on a
cat. One of the figures that adorned the gate at Newgate represented
Liberty with the figure of a cat lying at her feet. Whittington was a
former founder. In the cellar of his old house at Gloucester there was
found a stone, probably part of a chimney, showing in _basso-rilievo_
the figure of a boy carrying in his arms a cat. Cowper has a poem on A
Cat retired from Business. Heinrich’s verses are well known, or should
be:
The neighbours’ old cat often
Came to pay us a visit.
We made her a bow and a courtesy,
Each with a compliment in it.
After her health we asked,
Our care and regard to evince;
We have made the very same speeches
To many an old cat since.
This translation was by Mrs. Browning; many others have tried it with
success. Alfred de Musset apostrophized his cats in verse. Paul de Koch
frequently describes a favourite cat in his novels. Hoffman, the German
novelist, introduces cats into his weird and fantastic tales, and Poe
has given us The Black Cat. Keats composed a