II.

There is a list of great men given in The Tatler (No. 67), Sept. 13, 1709; and in No. 78, one Lemuel Ledger writes to put Mr. Bickerstaff in mind of “Alderman Whittington, who began the World with a Cat and died with three hundred and fifty thousand Pounds sterling”.

The Spectator (No. 5) March 6, 1711, says that “there was once a Design of casting into an Opera the Story of Whittington and his Cat, but that Mr. Rich abandoned the Idea for Fear of being overrun by Mice which the Cat could not kill.”

Suspicion seems to have been cast on the cat in the second half of the century, and it is interesting to find Goldsmith (“On Education”, 1759) advocating instead of romances “the old story of Whittington, were his cat left out” as “more serviceable to the tender mind than either Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, or a hundred others, where frugality is the only good quality the hero is not possessed of”.

Mr. Wheatley in his Chap-books and Folk-lore Tracts, notes that in 1771 the Rev. Samuel Pegge brought the subject of Whittington and his Cat before the Society of Antiquaries, “but he could make nothing at all of the Cat”.

[p. 48. 1.]

Other early editions of the Arabian Tales: 1712 and 1724.

The translation of the Arabian Nights was followed by English versions of Pétis de la Croix.

The Persian Tales, or the Thousand and One Days appeared in 1714, and was followed in the same year by The Persian and Turkish Tales Compleat.

The pseudo-translations of Gueullette were translated into English in 1725, as The Chinese Tales, or the Wonderful Adventures of the Mandarin Fum-Hoam.

[p. 56. 1.]

Moralised ballad-stories:—

(a) Robin Hood, J. Harris, London, n.d. (c. 1807).

(b) The Tragical History of the Children in the Wood, “containing a true Account of their unhappy Fate, with the History of their Parents and their unnatural Uncle. Interspersed with Morals for the Instruction of Children. To which is added the favourite Song of the Babes in the Wood. Embellished with Cuts.” London, n.d.