'Montaigne, playing with his cat,
Complains she thought him but an ass.'
And the annotator on this passage, in explanation, adds, that
'Montaigne in his Essays supposes his cat thought him a fool for
losing his time in playing with her;' but, under favour, this is a
misinterpretation of the essayist's sentiment, and something like a
libel on the capacity of both himself and cat. Montaigne's words
are: '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 also has she hers.'
Nobody who has read the striking essay in which these words appear
could for a moment misconceive their author's meaning. He is
vindicating natural theology from the objections of some of its
opponents, and in the course of his argument he takes occasion to
dwell on the wonderful instincts, and almost rational sagacity of
the inferior animals. We must, however, lament that, although he
does full justice to the 'half-reasoning elephant,' to the aptitude
and fidelity of the dog, to the marvellous economical arrangements
of the bees, and even to the imitative capacity of the magpie, he
pays no higher tribute to the merits of the cat than that she is as
capable of being amused as himself, and like himself, too, has her
periods of gravity when recreative sports are distasteful. Her
social qualities he does not allude to, though he, so eminently
social himself, could scarcely have failed to appreciate them.
In this country, at this time, cats have superseded parlour
favourites decidedly less agreeable in their appearance, and
infinitely more mischievous in their habits. Writing in the
seventeenth century, Burton, in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_, remarks
that 'Turkey gentlewomen, that are perpetual prisoners, still mewed
up according to the custom of the place, have little else, beside
their household business or to play with their children, to drive
away time but to dally with their cats, which they have _in
delitiis_, as many of our ladies and gentlewomen use monkeys and
little dogs.' It is not the least merit of the cat that it has
banished from our sitting-rooms those frightful mimicries of
humanity--the monkey tribe; and as to the little dogs Tray, Blanch,
and Sweetheart, although we are not insensible to their many virtues
and utilities, we care not to see them sleeping on our hearth-rug,
or reposing beside our work-tables.
* * * * *
[Footnote 5: In the matter of fanaticism, the modern Egyptians, or
rather the inhabitants of Alexandria, seem hardly to have
degenerated from their ethnic 'forbears,' as we read in Mr J.A. St
John's travels the account of a serious insurrection which broke out
some years ago in that city, in consequence of certain Jews having
taken up the butcher's trade, and having slain the meat with a knife
having _three_ instead of _five nails_ in the handle!]