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A Victorian artist and avid bird-watcher banished cats from his country cottage, but soon wished he hadn’t.
Harrison Weir was a Victorian artist, engraver and illustrator who specialised in drawing animals, especially songbirds. He was also mad about cats (in 1871 he organised the world’s first cat show) and assumed, naturally enough, that his two passions were incompatible. He discovered, however, that he could not have been more wrong.
A cat moved home from Edinburgh to Glasgow and seemed to settle in nicely, but it turned out she was only biding her time.
In a pamphlet published in 1815, the anonymous authors took a look at British zoology, aiming (they said) to amuse, to instruct and “to look through Nature up to Nature’s God”. The collection of anecdotes about cats included this remarkable story, a tale of stubborn determination worthy of Robert the Bruce’s famous spider.
After Mr Fitzwarren took away Dick’s cat, even the charms of Alice Fitzwarren were not enough to keep him in that house another day.
What follows is a paraphrase of the famous story of Dick Whittington and His Cat as told in verse by Richard Johnson in his Crowne Garland of Goulden Roses (1612), and in prose by Thomas Heywood in The Famous and Remarkable History of Sir Richard Whittington (1659). Sir Richard Whittington (?1354-1423) was a real historical person, so some notes are added to help separate fact from fiction.
In ‘Familiarity Dangerous,’ poet William Cowper tells a little tale warning that if you join in the game you play by the rules.
William Cowper was very much a cat person, so naturally these lines from the Latin of Vincent Bourne (1695-1747), who had been on the staff at Westminster School when Cowper was a pupil there, appealed to him. A kitten reminds us that if you want to be one of the gang it has got to be on their terms.
From the grateful solitude of his library in the Dordogne, Michel de Montaigne reflects on the companionship of his cat.
In 1571, aged 38, busy lawyer and courtier Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) retired to the library of his residence in the Dordogne and began writing essays on a wide range of subjects. His solitude was dear to him and his wife Françoise and daughter Léonore let him have it; but he did not spend it entirely alone.
A mouse’s delight at seeing his old enemy caught in a trap proves short-lived.
Yaugandharayana, minister of Udayana, King of Vatsa (roughly Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh), has made a casual assertion that even animals go to each other for protection. Yogeshvara challenges him to provide an example, so the wise minister tells him about a mouse that once lived at the bottom of a banyan tree.