31 



the^ reign of Justinian, has left two epigrams in which he scores 

 a cat for tearing off the head of a tame partridge.^ 



A poet of Bagdad bewails the fate of his cat killed with an 

 arrow while robbing a dovecote, and Miss Repplier in one of her 

 charming volumes reproduces his wail from the Arabic of Ibn 

 Alalaf Alnaharwany;2 but the most celebrated ancient poem 

 bewailing the cat's destructive 

 proclivities is the " Anathema 

 Marantha" by John Skelton, in 

 the "Boke of Phylyp Sparowe," 

 in which he calls down upon the 

 whole race of cats the vengeance 

 of the gods, mankind and the 

 monsters of all creation in punish- 

 ment for the killing of a pet spar- 

 row. The poem begins: — 



That vengeance I aske and crye 



By way of exclamacyon 



On all the whole nacyon 



Of cattes wild and tame 



God send them sorrowe and shame 



That cat eopecyally 



That slew so cruelly ,- * ^ n • u- j ^ r ^ • ,t< 



», I _^ „ . . ^ Cat stalking birds at a fountain. (From 



My lytell pretty sparrowe ^^ ^^,i^^t ^^^^^^ i^ ^^^ Neapolitan 



That I brought up at Carowe. Museum.) 



He devotes this cruel "catte" to the tender mercies of the 

 lions, leopards, "dragones," the formidable "mantycors of the 

 montaynes," and hopes that "the greedy gripes might tare out 

 all thy trypes," and so on and on and on. The little bird's 

 mistress also joins in the denunciation. She wails: — 



Those vylanoua false cattes 

 Were made for myse and rattes 

 And not for byrdes smalle. 



The Cat a Birdcatcher in Modern Times. 

 In every land, in every tongue, the cat has been noted as a 

 slayer of birds. Maister Salmon, who published "The Com- 

 pleat English Physician" in 1693, describes the cat as the mortal 

 enemy of the rat, mouse "and every sort of bird which it seizes 

 as its prey." The French and Germans, particularly, have de- 

 plored the destruction of birds by cats. M. Xavier Raspail, 

 in an article on the protection of useful birds, written in 1894, 



' The Cat, Past and Present, translated from the French of M. Champfleury (Jules Francois F61ix 

 Husaon Fleury), with notes by Mrs. (Frances) Cashel Hoey, 1885, pp. 17, 18. 

 * Repplier, Agnes: The Cat. 1912, p. 42. 



