or losing his time in
playing with her;" but, under favor, this is a misinterpretation of the
essayist's sentiments, 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 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In this country, at this time, cats have superseded parlor favorites
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-rugs, or
reposing beside our work-tables.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] In the matter of fanaticism, the modern Egyptians, or rather the
inhabitants of Alexandria, seem hardly to have degenerated from their
ethnic "forbears" as we read in Mr. J. A. St. John's