have attained the full glory of tiger or
leopard-hood, they will roar one whit less
fiercely than their papas or mammas; that
they would, had they their liberty, be at all
backward in the sudden spring, the howling,
roaring, rending, craunching, crunching, tearing,
rending, of some unhappy because too
corpulent buffalo, some indiscreet antelope,
some luckless negro, or some benighted officer
of Bengal Infantry? Or, cooped up as
they are in a den of the Zoological Gardens
even, do you think, for all their playful gambols
when the keeper makes his rounds at dinner-time,
they will refrain from the shin-bone
of beef—nay from devouring it with glaring
eyes, and low, menacing howls? Don't think
it. Don't think either, that if the keeper,
entering the den, were to be suddenly seized
with a fainting fit, or vertigo, or an aneurism,
or were to lose his footing, and fall down on
the flooring of the cage, that the leopard and
tiger-cubs would refrain from falling on him
and tearing his flesh, and craunching his
bones. So it is with the kitten. It is pretty
to see the little thing lapping its milk, gambolling
round its mother, playing with the
ball of worsted, the slipper, or the glove, with
now and then a gesture of apparently real
affection towards its parent; or of a weak
mew, more of annoyance than pain, as it
knocks itself up against the leg of a table, or
gets its little feet entangled with an odd skein
of cotton. But, this little innocent, sportive,
playful kitten, this interesting orphan and
sole survivor of a numerous family of brothers
and sisters who have all perished in that
grave of Grimalkin's household, a water-butt,
will, within a very few weeks, play with as
much delight—nay more—with something
very different from a ball of cotton, a skein of
silk, a glove, or a slipper. The plaything
will be a wretched, timorous, half-frightened-to-death,
half-lacerated-to-death mouse.
Hither and thither will the playful cat toss
it; now high, now low, now to the right, now
to the left, now on one side, now on the other,
now deluding it with fallacious hopes of
escape, allowing it to run to an exactly
sufficient distance to be recaptured, re-played
with, and re-tortured. This is sportiveness,
this is playfulness, this is what the kitten
does with the ball of cotton, and will do with
the mouse.

No! I cannot abide cats. Pet cats, wild
cats, torn cats, gib cats, Persian cats, Angola
cats, tortoiseshell cats, tabby cats, black cats,
Manx cats, brindled cats, mewing once, twice,
or thrice, as the case may be, none of these
cats delight me. They are associated in my
mind with none but disagreeable objects and
remembrances: now old maids, witchcraft,
dreadful sabbaths with old women flying up
the chimney upon broomsticks to drink hell
broth with the evil one, charms, incantations,
sorceries, sucking children's breaths, stopping
out late on the tiles, catterwauling and molrowing
in the night season, prowling about
the streets at unseasonable hours, and a
variety of other things too numerous and too
unpleasant to mention.

Don't tell me about the dogs of Stamboul,
—those mangy, ill-favoured, ferocious curs
are simply nuisances of the most abominable
description, and have no claim to be considered
curiosities. The dogs of Paris are all
alike; they all belong to somebody; they
are mean-spirited mediocre animals, submitting
to be shaved and curled, to be led about
in strings and chains, to be governed by dog-whips,
and to wear some wretched muzzling
apparatus, more humiliating than the caudine
forks—sometimes like a strawberry-pottle,
sometimes like a coal-scoop of wirework.
The French dogs are cowed by the tyrannical
surveillance of the police; by the horrible
threats promulgated against them by the
authorities in placards on the walls during
the hot weather. Poisoned boulets, and
arsenicated sausages are placed at the corners
of the streets to tempt them to eat and die.
They dare not bark without offending against
some of the provisions of the penal code.
Their spirit is broken. I wonder the
government in France, which is so fond of
stamping everything, from a passport to a
tailor's puff, does not take it into its head to
stamp the dogs. The "Timbre Imperial"
would complete their degradation.

But, the dogs of London: they are free;
they roam where they will; they laugh to
scorn the feeble enactments relative to
muzzling that do still occasionally, during the
dog days, come out from municipal and parochial
authorities. They cry, with an ironical
yelp, "first catch your dog!" Every dog in
London has a character. There are rich dogs,
poor dogs, good dogs, bad dogs, merry dogs
and sad dogs; dogs that have lost their tails
as Alcibiades' dog did his; dogs that steal,
and dogs that fight, and dogs that dance for
a livelihood. There are theatrical dogs (I
had one myself once), and pious dogs: there
are dogs essentially aristocratic in habit,
demeanour, and (I was going to say) thought;
and there are dogs whom a century of teaching,
example, high feeding, and aristocratic
associations would not render anything but
low-life dogs. There are parvenu dogs who
have originally been curs, and have afterwards,
by accident or favouritism, been
elevated into the position of pets, but still
maintain traces of their currish origin of the
days when they slept in a dust-heap, and
promenaded in a gutter, and fought with a
tinker's terrier for the stump of a cabbage-stalk.
There are dogs for day and dogs for
night, dogs for business and dogs for pleasure,
industrious dogs and lazy dogs.

The latter class, I am afraid far out-number
the industrious section of the dog community.
Few things, I think, can equal the luxuriously
contented, apathetically enjoying, gravely
sensual manner in which a dog abandons himself
to idleness and repose. I don't mean to