1 34 THE FIRESIDE SPHINX 



beholding his beauty, should think her lost Adonis 

 restored to life, and grow jealous of the kitten in 

 his arms. These pretty conceits, in which Pussy 

 but serves to illustrate the text, have nothing in 

 common with the directness of Herrick, or with 

 the personal studies of cat and kittenhood which 

 Cowper and Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold sub- 

 sequently gave to the world. They are not even 

 akin to Gray's famous lines, half mocking and half 

 piteous, which deplore the untimely death of Wal- 

 pole's Selima, " Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes." 

 That Horace Walpole should have delighted in cats 

 was inevitable. Their beauty, their refinement, 

 their delicate appreciation of luxurious surround- 

 ings, could never have appealed more surely to any 

 nature than to his. " Not English," was the cen- 

 sure habitually passed upon him by his contempo- 

 raries, to whom a taste for curios, and a distaste 

 for hard drinking, were equally unintelligible eccen- 

 tricities. Even that fine statesman, Lord Minto, 

 pronounced him "a prim, precise, pretending, con- 

 ceited savage ; but a most un-English one ; " and in 

 proof, either of his primness, or of the gentle char- 

 acter of his savagery, Walpole loved and cherished 

 cats. When his favourite met her tragic death, he 

 wrote to Gray, bewailing the loss he had sustained ; 

 and the poet, in doubt as to which of his friend's 

 cats had been drowned, replied with a playful letter 



