It is on evidence that more than one old woman has been condemned by our wise ancestors to pay the penalty of her presumed league with Satan in a fiery death, upon no better testimony than the fact that Harper, Rutterkin, or Robin had been seen entering her dwelling in the shape of a black cat. But if, in ancient times, old women, and young ones, too, have been brought to grief through the cats they fostered, certain it is that these creatures have suffered horrible reprisal at the hands of certain vagrants of the sex in our own.
Our Felis domestica has, for a long time, labored under the serious disadvantage of a traditional character. Buffon sums her up as a “faithless friend, brought in to oppose a still more insidious enemy;” and Goldsmith—who, it is well known, became a writer of natural history “upon compulsion,” and had neither time nor opportunity for personal observation of the habits and instincts of the creatures he so charmingly describes—followed in the track of the great naturalist, and echoes this ungracious definition.
Boys have a natural contempt for cats, and picking them up by the tail, tossing them over the wall, or tying old tin pots to their caudal end, to see how fast they can run, are among their most trifling sports at the expense of Tom and Tabby. I have known a cruel boy to roll a cat in turpentine, and set fire to her. Few men have any feeling but repugnance towards the feline race. The exceptions are in the past.
Cardinal Wolsey’s cat sat on the arm of his chair of state, or took up her position at the back of his throne when he held audiences; and the cat of the poet Petrarch, after death, occupied, embalmed, a niche in his studio; indeed, poets appear to be more susceptible of pussy’s virtues and graces than other persons; and she has, on many occasions, been made the subject of their verse, the sentiment of which fully expresses a sense of the maligned animal’s faithfulness and affection.
Tasso, reduced to such a strait of poverty as to be obliged to borrow a crown from a friend to subsist on through a week, turns for mute sympathy to his faithful cat, and disburdens his case in a charming sonnet, in which he entreats her to assist him through the night with the lustre of her moon-like eyes, having no candles by which he could see to write his verses.
SPORT FOR THE BOYS BUT DEATH FOR THE CAT.
An editor facetiously says, “We have here among us at this time an addition to the M. D.’s in the shape of two cat doctors, who have the terrible idea that they were put upon this earth for the sole object of doctoring cats, and now the mortality list shows, at the least calculation, that no less than eighteen cats and two kittens have travelled to that bourn from which no passengers have ever yet returned, and all because they were the unlucky sons and daughters of ye night prowlers who had been sacrificed for the good of the future cat generation.”