In book iii. chap. vi. of Joseph Andrews, occurs this passage:—“You would have seen cities in embroidery transplanted from the boxes to the pit, whose ancient inhabitants were exalted to the galleries, where they played upon cat-calls.”
In Lloyd’s Law Student we find:—
“By law let others strive to gain renown!
Florio’s a gentleman, a man o’ th’ town.
He nor courts clients, or the law regarding,
Hurries from Nando’s down to Covent Garden.
Zethe’s a scholar—mark him in the pit,
With critic Cat-call sound the stops of wit.”
In Chetwood’s History of the Stage (1741), there is a story of a sea-officer who was much plagued by “a couple of sparks, prepared with their offensive instruments, vulgarly termed Cat-calls;” and describes how “the squeak was stopped in the middle by a blow from the officer, which he gave with so strong a will that his child’s trumpet was struck through his cheek.”
The Cat-call used at theatres in former times was a small circular whistle, composed of two plates of tin of about the size of a half-penny perforated by a hole in the centre, and connected by a band or border of the same metal about one-eighth of an inch thick. The instrument was readily concealed within the mouth, and the perpetrator of the noise could not be detected.
There used to be a public-house of some notoriety at the corner of Downing-street, next to King-street, called the “Cat and Bagpipes.” It was also a chop house used by many persons connected with the public offices in the neighbourhood. George Rose, so well known in after life as the friend of Pitt, Clerk of the Parliament, Secretary of the Treasury, etc., and executor of the Earl of Marchmont, but then “a bashful young man,” was one of the frequenters of this tavern.
Madame Catalini is thus alluded to with disrespectful abbreviation of her name in a new song on Covent Garden Theatre, printed and sold by J. Pitts, No. 14, Great St. Andrew-street, Seven Dials.
“This noble building, to be sure, has beauty without bounds,
It cost upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds;
They’ve Madame Catalini there to open her white throat,
But to hear your foreign singers I would not give a groat;
So haste away unto the play, whose name has reached the skies,
And when the Cati ope’s her mouth, oh how she’ll catch the flies!”
It was once upon a time the trick of a countryman to bring a Cat to market in a bag, and substitute it for a sucking pig in another bag, which he sold to the unwary when he got the chance. If the trick was discovered prematurely, it was called letting the cat out of the bag—if not—he that made the bad bargain was said to have bought a pig in a poke. To turn the Cat in the pan, according to Bacon, is when that which a man says to another he says it as if another had said it to him.
There is a kind of ship, too, called a Cat, a vessel formed on the Norwegian model, of about 600 tons burthen. That was the sort of cat that brought the great Dick Whittington, of “turn again” memory, his fortune. Do you remember how sorry you were to find out the truth? Do you recollect what a pang it cost you when first you heard that Robinson Crusoe was not true? I shall never forget how vexed and disappointed I was at hearing that Dick Turpin never did ride to York on his famous mare Black Bess, and that no such person as William Tell ever existed, and that that beautiful story about the apple was only a beautiful story after all.