Cowper, Task, Book I.
This circumstance, no doubt, causes the Spaniards to keep them in cages, as we do singing-birds. White tells us that, if supplied with moistened leaves, they will sing as merrily and loud in a paper cage as in the fields; but he did not succeed in planting a colony of them in the terrace of his garden, though he bored holes for them in the turf to save them the labour of digging.
The hearth-cricket, again, though we hear it occasionally in the hedge-banks in summer, prefers the warmth of an oven or a good fire, and thence, residing as it were always in the torrid zone, is ever alert and merry—a good Christmas fire being to it what the heat of the dog-days is to others.
Though crickets are frequently heard by day, yet their natural time of motion is only in the night. As soon as darkness prevails the chirping increases, whilst the hearth-crickets come running forth, and are often to be seen in great numbers, from the size of a flea to that of their full stature.
Like the field-cricket, the hearth-crickets are sometimes kept for their music; and the learned Scaliger took so great a fancy to their song, that he was accustomed to keep them in a box in his study. It is reported that in some parts of Africa they are kept and fed in a kind of iron oven, and sold to the natives, who like their chirp, and think it is a good soporific.—(Mouffet, Theat. Insect. 136.)
Milton, too, chose for his contemplative pleasures a spot where crickets resorted:—
“Where glowing embers through the room
Teach light to counterfeit a gloom,
Far from all resort of mirth,
See the cricket on the hearth.”—Il Penseroso.