SIR HORACE WALPOLE AND PATAPAN.
But the label would not have told him, as it does us, that this was the veritable “Tub of Gold Fishes” in which the favorite cat of Thomas Grey was drowned. “Demurest of the tabby kind”—Selima gazed at the fish, and longed; extended “a whisker first and then a claw;” and then—
“The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.”
She may have found some comfort—since drown she must—in the vase being genuine old china; just as Clarence preferred drowning in Malmsey wine to water; but her best comfort—had she known it—was the poem to be written on her fate, the poem which still points her morals and adorns her tale.
No one, in this group of literary people, was so intimate with cats as Southey. He delighted in them, he admired them, he understood them, and he thought no house quite furnished unless it had a baby and a kitten!
It was to his little daughter Edith that this author dedicated his history of the cats of Greta Hall, which he intended to supplement by the Memoirs of Cats’ Eden. Unfortunately for us all, the last was never finished. The most delightful of philofelists—to use his own coinage—he tells the story of his cats con amore; from the fate untimely of Ovid, Virgil, and Othello, to the merited honors heaped upon Lord Nelson, a great carrot-colored cat promoted by him to the highest rank in the peerage, through all its degrees, under the titles of His Serene Highness, the Archduke Rumpelstilzchen, Marquis Mac-Bum, Earl Tomlemagne, Baron Raticide, Waswlher and Skaratchi. Felicitous titles, are they not?
But how the list lengthens! Only a word can be given to Emily Brontë with her faithful, sullen mastiff Keeper; to Charlotte Brontë, with her black-and-white curly-haired Flossy; to Bulwer, with his Newfoundland Terror, and his better loved Andalusian horse; to Mrs. Bulwer—herself a beautiful spoiled child—with her beautiful spoiled Blenheim, Fairy, described by Disraeli as “no bigger than a bird of paradise, and quite as brilliant”—a Fairy that had its own printed visiting cards, and paid fashionable calls with its mistress; to Charles Reade, of keen wit and large heart, who petted squirrels, hares, and deer, as well as dogs, who wept when the exigencies of Never too Late to Mend required him to kill Carlo, and who humorously advised Ouida to name one of her dogs Tonic, as he was “a mixture of steal and w(h)ine.”
CHARLES DICKENS’S PET RAVEN, GRIP.