THE CAT TRIUMPHANT 159 



was " absolutely composed of cats." And he it 

 was whose passionate love-songs banished slumber 

 from the eyes of men, and stirred the gentle Ettrick 

 Shepherd into an unwonted fury of denunciation. 

 " I 've often thocht it aneuch to sicken ane o' love 

 a' their days," he observes indignantly in the 

 " Noctes," "just to reflect that a' that- hissin', and 

 spitting, and snuffing, and squeaking, and squeal- 

 ing, and howling, and growling, and groaning, a' 

 mixed up into ae infernal gallemaufry o' din, onlike 

 onything else even in this noisy world, was wi' these 

 creatures the saftest, sweetest expression 0' the same 

 tender passion that from Adam's lips whispered per- 

 suasion into Eve's ear, in the bowers o' Paradise." 



Perhaps, indeed, much of the unreasonable fear 

 and hatred with which the mediaeval peasant re- 

 garded his cat may be traceable to its extraordinary 

 vocal powers. Those long-drawn notes which sud- 

 denly pierce the silence of the night, so inhumanly 

 human in their swelling cadences ; those rising 

 tides of passion, those sudden plunges into unveiled 

 horror, — rwhat wonder that they carried consterna- 

 tion to minds always attuned to the supernatural ! 

 One remembers how Coleridge wrote of the cats 

 of Malta, who were in the habit of meeting under 

 his bedroom window, and to whose nocturnal sym- 

 phonies he listened with quaking heart. " It is the 

 discord of Torment, and of Rage, and of Hate, of 



