The events detailed in the preceding narrative are fitted to suggest various interesting reflections and amusing speculations. The fate of the Palæologi—one day on a throne, the next in a dungeon, passing from regal state to wretched exile—may have been the bitter lot of other imperial families. If we find the descendants of the Greek emperors in the humble occupation of sailors and churchwardens, and vestrymen and road-trustees, there is nothing extravagant in the supposition, that we may have royal porters and scavengers on our streets, the sceptre having degenerated into the besom, and the truck taken the place of the chariot of state. The family of Nimrod may still exist, and retain their ancestral propensities in the craft of sportsmen and deer-stalkers, or in the lower grade of Jehus and jockeys. Who knows but the posterity of Solomon may be retailing old clothes, and the heirs of the Nebuchadnezzar dynasty still exist somewhere—perhaps among our graziers or cattle-dealers, our keepers of dairies or secretaries of agricultural associations. The line of Tamerlane may have ended in a grave-digger, and that of Frederick Barbarossa in a hair-dresser. The ideal transmigration of Pythagoras was not more improbable or more wonderful than the strange metamorphoses through which, in the course of centuries, the living representatives of kings and emperors are sometimes doomed to pass.
A CHAPTER ON CATS
The newspapers have recently been chronicling, as a fact provocative of especial wonder, the enterprise of some speculative merchant of New York, who has just been despatching a cargo of one hundred cats to the republic of New Granada, in which it would appear the race, owing, as we may believe, to the frequently disturbed state of the country, has become almost extinct.
Your cat is a domestic animal, and naturally conservative in its tastes—averse therefore to uproar, and to all those given to change. Its propensities are to meditation and contemplative tranquillity, for which reason it has ever been held in reverence by nations of a similar staid and composed disposition, and has been the favourite companion and constant friend of grave philosophers and thoughtful students. By the ancient Egyptians cats were held in the highest esteem; and we learn from Diodorus Siculus, their 'lives and safeties' were tendered more dearly than those of any other animal, whether biped or quadruped. 'He who has voluntarily killed a consecrated animal,' says this writer, 'is punished with death; but if any one has even involuntarily killed a cat or an ibis, it is impossible for him to escape death: the mob drags him to it, treating him with every cruelty, and sometimes without waiting for judgment to be passed. This treatment inspires such terror, that, if any person happen to find one of these animals dead, he goes to a distance from it, and by his cries and groans indicates that he has found the animal dead. This superstition is so deeply rooted in the minds of the Egyptians, and the respect they bear these animals is so profound, that at the time when their king, Ptolemy, was not yet declared the friend of the Roman people—when they were paying all possible court to travellers from Italy, and their fears made them avoid every ground of accusation and every pretext for making war upon them—yet a Roman having killed a cat, the people rushed to his house, and neither the entreaties of the grandees, whom the king sent for the purpose, nor the terror of the Roman name, could protect this man from punishment, although the act was involuntary. I do not relate this anecdote,' adds the historian, 'on the authority of another, for I was an eye-witness of it during my stay in Egypt.'5
During their lives, the consecrated cats were fed upon fish, kept for the purpose in tanks; and 'when one of them happened to die,' says the veracious writer just cited, 'it was wrapped in linen, and after the bystanders had beaten themselves on the breast, it was carried to the Tarichoea, where it was embalmed with coedria and other substances which have the virtue of embalming bodies, after which it was interred in the sacred monument.' It has puzzled not a little the learned archæologists, who have endeavoured to discover a profound philosophy figured and symbolised in the singular mythology of the Egyptians, to explain how it is that in Thebes, where the sacred character of the cat was held in the highest reverence, and cherished with the greatest devotion, not only embalmed cats have been found, but also the bodies of rats and mice, which had been subjected to the same anti-putrescent process. If, however, Herodotus is to be credited, the Egyptians owed a deep debt of gratitude to the mice; for the venerable historian assures us, and on the unquestionable authority of the Egyptian priests, that when Sennacherib and his army lay at Pelusium, a mighty corps of field-mice entered the camp by night, and eating up the quivers, bowstrings, and buckler-leathers of the Assyrian troops, in this summary fashion liberated Egypt from the terror of the threatened invasion. Probably the existence of mice-mummies may be accounted for in this way, and if—resorting to no violent supposition—we presume in the good work which the tiny patriots so sagaciously accomplished that their cousins-german the rats were assistant, the whole matter receives a satisfactory explication. The hypothesis, it is submitted, is not without plausible recommendations on its behalf. There is extant a fragment of a comedy, entitled 'The Cities,' written by the Rhodian poet Anaxandrides, in which the Egyptian worship of animals is amusingly enough quizzed. A translation will be found in Dr Prichard's Analysis of Egyptian Mythology. The lines referring to cat-worship are as follow:—
'You cry and wail whene'er ye spy a cat,
Starving or sick; I count it not a sin
To hang it up, and flay it for its skin;'
from which it appears this gay free-thinker was not only somewhat sceptical in his religious notions, but, moreover, a hard-hearted, good-for-nothing fellow—one who, had he lived in our times, would unquestionably have brought himself within the sweep of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the Duke of Beaufort's Humanity Act.
We learn from Herodotus that in his days it was customary, whenever a cat died, for the whole household at once to go into mourning, and this although the lamented decease might have been the result of old age, or other causes purely natural. In the case of a cat's death, however, the eyebrows only were required to be shaved off; but when a dog, a beast of more distinguished reputation, departed this life, every inmate of the house was expected to shave his head and whole body all over. Both cats and dogs are watched and attended to with the greatest solicitude during illness. Indeed, by the ancient Egyptians the cat was treated much in the same way as are dogs amongst us: we find them even accompanying their masters on their aquatic shooting-excursions; and, if the testimony of ancient monuments is to be relied on, often catching the game for them, although it may be permitted to doubt whether they ever actually took to the water for this purpose.
In modern Egypt the cat, although more docile and companionable than its European sister, has much degenerated; but still, on account of its usefulness in destroying scorpions and other reptiles, it is treated with some consideration—suffered to eat out of the same dish with the children, to join with them in their sports, and to be their constant companion and daily friend. A modern Egyptian would esteem it a heinous sin indeed, to destroy, or even maltreat a cat; and we are told by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, that benevolent individuals have bequeathed funds by which a certain number of these animals are daily fed at Cairo at the Cadi's court, and the bazaar of Khan Khaleel.
But a tender regard for the inferior animals is a prevailing characteristic of the Oriental races, and is inculcated as a duty by their various religions. At Fez there was, and perhaps is at this day, a wealthily-endowed hospital, the greater part of the funds of which was devoted to the support and medical treatment of invalid cranes and storks, and procuring them a decent sepulture whenever they chanced to die. The founders are said to have entertained the poetical notion that these birds are, in truth, human beings, natives of distant islands, who at certain periods assume a foreign shape, and after they have satisfied their curiosity with visiting other lands, return to their own, and resume their original form.
To return, however, not to our sheep, but our cats, we must remark that, in modern times, in spite of the kindness the cat habitually receives in Egypt, his morale is not in that country rated very high—the universal impression being that, although, like Snug the joiner's lion, he is by nature 'a very gentle beast,' still he is by no means 'of a good conscience;' that he is, in short, a most ungrateful beast; and that when, in a future state, it is asked of him how he has been treated by man in this, he will obstinately deny all the benefits he has received at his hand, and give him such a character for cruelty and hardness of heart as is shocking to think of. The dog, however, it is understood, will conduct himself more discreetly, and readily acknowledge the good offices for which he is indebted to the family of mankind.
Singular anecdotes have been related of the intense repugnance persons have been found to entertain to these, at worst, harmless animals. One shall be given in the very words of the Rev. Nicholas Wanley, who, in his authentic Wonders of the Little World, has recorded a number of other facts quite as marvellous, and sustained by testimony not one whit more exceptionable:—'Mathiolus tells of a German, who coming in winter-time into an inn to sup with him and some other of his friends, the woman of the house being acquainted with his temper (lest he should depart at the sight of a young cat which she kept to breed up), had beforehand hid her kitling in a chest in the same room where we sat at supper. But though he had neither seen nor heard it, yet after some time that he had sucked in the air infected by the cat's breath, that quality of his temperament that had antipathy to that creature being provoked, he sweat, and, of a sudden, paleness came over his face, and, to the wonder of us all that were present, he cried out that in some corner of the room there was a cat that lay hid.' Not long after the battle of Wagram and the second occupation of Vienna by the French, an aide-de-camp of Napoleon, who at the time occupied, together with his suite, the Palace of Schönbrunn, was proceeding to bed at an unusually late hour, when, on passing the door of Napoleon's bedroom, he was surprised by a most singular noise, and repeated calls from the Emperor for assistance. Opening the door hastily, and rushing into the room, a singular spectacle presented itself—the great soldier of the age, half undressed, his countenance agitated, the beaded drops of perspiration standing on his brow, in his hand his victorious sword, with which he was making frequent and convulsive lunges at some invisible enemy through the tapestry that lined the walls. It was a cat that had secreted herself in this place; and Napoleon held cats not so much in abhorrence as in terror. 'A feather,' says the poet, 'daunts the brave;' and a greater poet, through the mouth of his Shylock, remarks that 'there are some that are mad if they behold a cat—a harmless, necessary cat.' Count Bertram would seem to have shared in this unaccountable aversion. When 'Monsieur Parolles, the gallant militarist, that had the whole theory of war in the knot of his scarf, and the practice in the chape of his dagger,' was convicted of mendacity and cowardice, Bertram exclaimed, 'I could endure anything before this but a cat, and now he's a cat to me.' The force of censure could no further go.
If Napoleon, however, held cats, as has been averred, in positive fear, there have been others, and some of them illustrious captains, that have regarded them with other feelings. Marshal Turenne could amuse himself for hours in playing with his kittens; and the great general, Lord Heathfield, would often appear on the walls of Gibraltar, at the time of the famous siege, attended by his favourite cats. Cardinal Richelieu was also fond of cats; and when we have enumerated the names of Cowper and Dr Johnson, of Thomas Gray and Isaac Newton, and, above all, of the tender-hearted and meditative Montaigne, the list is far from complete of those who have bestowed on the feline race some portion of their affections.
Butler, in his Hudibras, observes, in an oft-quoted passage, that
'Montaigne, playing with his cat,
Complains she thought him but an ass.'
And the annotator on this passage, in explanation, adds, that 'Montaigne in his Essays supposes his cat thought him a fool for losing his time in playing with her;' but, under favour, this is a misinterpretation of the essayist's sentiment, 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 for 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 parlour favourites 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-rug, or reposing beside our work-tables.