But a tender regard for the inferior animals is a prevailing characteristic of the Oriental races, and is inculcated as a duty by their various religions. At Fez there was, and perhaps is at this day, a wealthily-endowed hospital, the greater part of the funds of which was devoted to the support and medical treatment of invalid cranes and storks, and procuring them a decent sepulture whenever they chanced to die. The founders are said to have entertained the poetical notion that these birds are, in truth, human beings, natives of distant islands, who at certain periods assume a foreign shape, and after they have satisfied their curiosity with visiting other lands, return to their own, and resume their original form.
To return, however, not to our sheep, but our cats, we must remark that, in modern times, in spite of the kindness the cat habitually receives in Egypt, his morale is not in that country rated very high—the universal impression being that, although, like Snug the joiner's lion, he is by nature 'a very gentle beast,' still he is by no means 'of a good conscience;' that he is, in short, a most ungrateful beast; and that when, in a future state, it is asked of him how he has been treated by man in this, he will obstinately deny all the benefits he has received at his hand, and give him such a character for cruelty and hardness of heart as is shocking to think of. The dog, however, it is understood, will conduct himself more discreetly, and readily acknowledge the good offices for which he is indebted to the family of mankind.
Singular anecdotes have been related of the intense repugnance persons have been found to entertain to these, at worst, harmless animals. One shall be given in the very words of the Rev. Nicholas Wanley, who, in his authentic Wonders of the Little World, has recorded a number of other facts quite as marvellous, and sustained by testimony not one whit more exceptionable:—'Mathiolus tells of a German, who coming in winter-time into an inn to sup with him and some other of his friends, the woman of the house being acquainted with his temper (lest he should depart at the sight of a young cat which she kept to breed up), had beforehand hid her kitling in a chest in the same room where we sat at supper. But though he had neither seen nor heard it, yet after some time that he had sucked in the air infected by the cat's breath, that quality of his temperament that had antipathy to that creature being provoked, he sweat, and, of a sudden, paleness came over his face, and, to the wonder of us all that were present, he cried out that in some corner of the room there was a cat that lay hid.' Not long after the battle of Wagram and the second occupation of Vienna by the French, an aide-de-camp of Napoleon, who at the time occupied, together with his suite, the Palace of Schönbrunn, was proceeding to bed at an unusually late hour, when, on passing the door of Napoleon's bedroom, he was surprised by a most singular noise, and repeated calls from the Emperor for assistance. Opening the door hastily, and rushing into the room, a singular spectacle presented itself—the great soldier of the age, half undressed, his countenance agitated, the beaded drops of perspiration standing on his brow, in his hand his victorious sword, with which he was making frequent and convulsive lunges at some invisible enemy through the tapestry that lined the walls. It was a cat that had secreted herself in this place; and Napoleon held cats not so much in abhorrence as in terror. 'A feather,' says the poet, 'daunts the brave;' and a greater poet, through the mouth of his Shylock, remarks that 'there are some that are mad if they behold a cat—a harmless, necessary cat.' Count Bertram would seem to have shared in this unaccountable aversion. When 'Monsieur Parolles, the gallant militarist, that had the whole theory of war in the knot of his scarf, and the practice in the chape of his dagger,' was convicted of mendacity and cowardice, Bertram exclaimed, 'I could endure anything before this but a cat, and now he's a cat to me.' The force of censure could no further go.
If Napoleon, however, held cats, as has been averred, in positive fear, there have been others, and some of them illustrious captains, that have regarded them with other feelings. Marshal Turenne could amuse himself for hours in playing with his kittens; and the great general, Lord Heathfield, would often appear on the walls of Gibraltar, at the time of the famous siege, attended by his favourite cats. Cardinal Richelieu was also fond of cats; and when we have enumerated the names of Cowper and Dr Johnson, of Thomas Gray and Isaac Newton, and, above all, of the tender-hearted and meditative Montaigne, the list is far from complete of those who have bestowed on the feline race some portion of their affections.
Butler, in his Hudibras, observes, in an oft-quoted passage, that
'Montaigne, playing with his cat,
Complains she thought him but an ass.'
And the annotator on this passage, in explanation, adds, that 'Montaigne in his Essays supposes his cat thought him a fool for losing his time in playing with her;' but, under favour, this is a misinterpretation of the essayist's sentiment, and something like a libel on the capacity of both himself and cat. Montaigne's words are: 'When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me? We mutually divert each other with our play. If I have my hour to begin or refuse, so also has she hers.' Nobody who has read the striking essay in which these words appear could for a moment misconceive their author's meaning. He is vindicating natural theology from the objections of some of its opponents, and in the course of his argument he takes occasion to dwell on the wonderful instincts, and almost rational sagacity of the inferior animals. We must, however, lament that, although he does full justice to the 'half-reasoning elephant,' to the aptitude and fidelity of the dog, to the marvellous economical arrangements of the bees, and even to the imitative capacity of the magpie, he pays no higher tribute to the merits of the cat than that she is as capable of being amused as himself, and like himself, too, has her periods of gravity when recreative sports are distasteful. Her social qualities he does not allude to, though he, so eminently social himself, could scarcely have failed to appreciate them.
In this country, at this time, cats have superseded parlour favourites decidedly less agreeable in their appearance, and infinitely more mischievous in their habits. Writing in the seventeenth century, Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, remarks that 'Turkey gentlewomen, that are perpetual prisoners, still mewed up according to the custom of the place, have little else, beside their household business or to play with their children, to drive away time but to dally with their cats, which they have in delitiis, as many of our ladies and gentlewomen use monkeys and little dogs.' It is not the least merit of the cat that it has banished from our sitting-rooms those frightful mimicries of humanity—the monkey tribe; and as to the little dogs Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, although we are not insensible to their many virtues and utilities, we care not to see them sleeping on our hearth-rug, or reposing beside our work-tables.