of the feline
race. He is still sore at the prejudice and injustice of the people
he has just left. It culminated in the conduct of a lady who declared
that cats were poison, and who, "when pussy appeared in the room, had
the presence of mind to faint." These people had rallied him on the
absurdity of his enthusiasm; but, as he says, the Marquise well knows,
"how many women have a passion for cats, and how many men are women in
this respect."

So he starts away on his dissertation, with all its elegant pedantry,
its paradoxical wit, its genuine touches of observation and its
constant sparkle of anecdote. He is troubled to account for the
existence of the cat. An Ottoman legend relates that when the animals
were in the Ark, Noah gave the lion a great box on the ear, which made
him sneeze, and produce a cat out his nose. But the author questions
this origin, and is more inclined to agree with a Turkish Minister of
Religion, sometime Ambassador to France, that the ape, "weary of a
sedentary life" in the Ark, paid his attentions to a very agreeable
young lioness, whose infidelities resulted in the birth of a Tom-cat
and a Puss-cat, and that these, combining the qualities of their
parents, spread through the Ark _un esprit de coquetterie_--which
lasted during the whole of the sojourn there. Moncrif has no
difficulty in showing that the East has always been devoted to cats,
and he tells the story of Mahomet, who, being consulted one day on
a point of piety, preferred to cut off his sleeve, on which his
favourite pussy was asleep, rather than wake her violently by rising.

From the French poets, Moncrif collects a good many curious tributes
to the "harmless, necessary cat." I am seized with an ambition to put
some fragments of these into English verse. Most of them are highly
complimentary. It is true that Ronsard was one of those who could not
appreciate a "matou." He sang or said:

_There is no man now living anywhere
Who hates cats with a deeper hate than I;
I hate their eyes, their heads, the way they stare,
And when I see one come, I turn and fly_.

But among the _precieuses_ of the seventeenth century there was much
more appreciation. Mme. Deshoulieres wrote a whole series of songs
and couplets about her cat, Grisette. In a letter to her husband,
referring to the attentions she herself receives from admirers, she
adds:

_Deshoulieres cares not for the smart
Her bright eyes cause, disdainful hus