t would be a sensible satisfaction to me (before I
testify my sorrow, and the sincere part I take in your misfortune) to
know for certain who it is I lament. I knew Zara and Selima (Selima,
was it? or Fatima?), or rather I knew them both together; for I
cannot justly say which was which. Then as to your handsome Cat, the
name you distinguish her by, I am no less at a loss, as well knowing
one's handsome cat is always the cat one likes best; or if one be
alive and the other dead, it is usually the latter that is the
handsomest. Besides, if the point were never so clear, I hope you do
not think me so ill-bred or so imprudent as to forfeit all my
interest in the survivor; oh no! I would rather seem to mistake, and
imagine to be sure it must be the tabby one that had met with this
sad accident. Till this affair is a little better determined, you
will excuse me if I do not begin to cry,

Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque doloris.

"... Heigh ho! I feel (as you to be sure have done long since) that I
have very little to say, at least in prose. Somebody will be the
better for it; I do not mean you, but your Cat, feue Mademoiselle
Selime, whom I am about to immortalize for one week or fortnight, as
follows: [the Ode follows, which we need not reprint here].

"There's a poem for you, it is rather too long for an Epitaph."

2. Cf. Lady M. W. Montagu, _Town Eclogues_:

"Where the tall jar erects its stately pride,
With antic shapes in China's azure dyed."

3. _The azure flowers that blow_. Johnson and Wakefield find fault
with this as redundant, but it is no more so than poetic usage
allows. In the _Progress of Poesy_, i. 1, we have again: "The
laughing flowers that round them blow." Cf. _Comus_, 992:

"Iris there with humid bow
Waters the odorous banks that blow
Flowers of more mingled hue
Than her purfled scarf can shew."

4. _Tabby_. For the derivation of this word from the French _tabis_,
a kind of silk, see Wb. In the first ed. the 5th line preceded the
4th.

6. _The lake_. In the mock-heroic vein that runs through the whole
poem.

11. _Jet_. This word comes, through the French, from Gagai, a town in
Lycia, where the mineral was first obtained.

14. _Two angel forms_. In the first ed. "two beauteous forms," which
Mitford prefers to the present reading, "as the images of _angel_ and
_genii_ interfere with each other, and bring different associations
to the mind."

16. _Tyrian hue_. Ex