The universal interest which this accomplished animal has excited throughout the country is a striking refutation that genius is not honored in its own day and generation. Perhaps no other living critic has attained the popularity and vogue now enjoyed by our cat. For years he worked in silence, unknown, perhaps, beyond the limits of the office. He is a sort of Rosicrucian cat, and his motto has been “to know all and to keep himself unknown.” But he could not escape the glory his efforts deserved, and a few mornings ago he woke up, like Byron, to find himself famous.
We are glad to announce that he hasn’t been puffed up by the enthusiastic praise which comes to him from all sources. He is the same industrious, conscientious, sharp-eyed, and sharp-toothed censor of copy that he has always been, nor should we have known that he is conscious of the admiration he excites among his esteemed contemporaries of the press had we not observed him in the act of dilacerating a copy of the Graphic containing an alleged portrait of him.
It was impossible not to sympathize with his evident indignation. The Graphic’s portrait did foul injustice to his majestic and intellectual features. Besides, it represented him as having a bandage over one eye, as if he had been involved in controversy and had had his eye mashed. Now, aside from the fact that he needs both eyes to discharge his literary duties properly, he is able to whip his weight in office cats, and his fine, large eyes have never been shrouded in black, and we don’t believe they ever will be. He is a soldier as well as a scholar.
We have received many requests to give a detailed account of the personal habits and peculiarities of this feline Aristarchus. Indeed, we have been requested to prepare a full biographical sketch to appear in the next edition of “Homes of American Authors.” At some future day we may satisfy public curiosity with the details of his literary methods. But genius such as his defies analysis, and the privacy of a celebrity ought not to be rudely invaded.
It is not out of place, however, to indicate a few traits which illustrate his extraordinary faculty of literary decomposition, so to speak. His favorite food is a tariff discussion. When a big speech, full of wind and statistics, comes within his reach, he pounces upon it immediately and digests the figures at his leisure. During the discussion of the Morrison Bill he used to feed steadily on tariff speeches for eight hours a day, and yet his appetite remained unimpaired.
When a piece of stale news or a long-winded, prosy article comes into the office, his remarkable sense of smell instantly detects it, and it is impossible to keep it from him. He always assists with great interest at the opening of the office mail, and he files several hundred letters a day in his interior department. The favorite diversion of the office-boys is to make him jump for twelve-column articles on the restoration of the American merchant marine.
He takes a keen delight in hunting for essays on civil-service reform, and will play with them, if he has time, for hours. They are so pretty that he hates to kill them, but duty is duty. Clumsy and awkward English he springs at with indescribable quickness and ferocity; but he won’t eat it. He simply tears it up. He can’t stand everything.
We don’t pretend he is perfect. We admit that he has an uncontrollable appetite for the Congressional Record. We have to keep this peculiar publication out of his reach. He will sit for hours and watch with burning eyes the iron safe in which we are obliged to shut up the Record for safe-keeping. Once in a while we let him have a number or two. He becomes uneasy without it. It is his catnip.
With the exception of this pardonable excess he is a blameless beast. He mouses out all the stupid stuff and nonsense that finds its way into the office and goes for it tooth and claw. He is the biggest copyholder in the world. And he never gets tired. His health is good, and we have not deemed it necessary to take out a policy on any one of his valuable lives.
Many of our esteemed contemporaries are furnishing their offices with cats, but they can never hope to have the equal of the Sun’s venerable polyphage. He is a cat of genius.