In one of Gay’s fables about animals the cat is asked what she can do to benefit the proposed confederation. She answers scornfully: ... These teeth, these claws, With vigilance shall serve the cause. The mouse destroyed by my pursuit No longer shall your feasts pollute, Nor eat, from nightly ambuscade With watchful teeth your stores invade. The story of Dick Whittington and his cat is doubtless true. All the pictorial and architectural relics of Whittington represent him with the cat—a black and white cat—at his left hand, or his hand resting on a cat. One of the figures that adorned the gate at Newgate represented Liberty with the figure of a cat lying at her feet. Whittington was a former founder. In the cellar of his old house at Gloucester there was found a stone, probably part of a chimney, showing in _basso-rilievo_ the figure of a boy carrying in his arms a cat. Cowper has a poem on A Cat retired from Business. Heinrich’s verses are well known, or should be: The neighbours’ old cat often Came to pay us a visit. We made her a bow and a courtesy, Each with a compliment in it. After her health we asked, Our care and regard to evince; We have made the very same speeches To many an old cat since. This translation was by Mrs. Browning; many others have tried it with success. Alfred de Musset apostrophized his cats in verse. Paul de Koch frequently describes a favourite cat in his novels. Hoffman, the German novelist, introduces cats into his weird and fantastic tales, and Poe has given us The Black Cat. Keats composed a SONNET TO A CAT: Cat, who has passed thy grand climacteric, How many mice and rats hast in thy days Destroyed? How many tidbits stolen? Gaze With those bright languid segments green, and prick Those velvet ears, but prythee do not stick Thy latent talons in me, and tell me all thy frays, Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick; Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists, For all thy wheezy asthma, and for all Thy tail’s tip is nicked off, and though the fists Of many a maid have given thee many a maul, Still is thy fur as when the lists In youth thou enteredst on glass-bottled wall. Clinton Scollard writes tenderly of his lost GRIMALKIN: _An Elegy on Peter, aged Twelve._