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 134 beholding his beauty, should think her lost Adonis restored to life, and grow jealous of the kitten in his arms. These pretty conceits, in which Pussy but serves to illustrate the text, have nothing in common with the directness of Herrick, or with the personal studies of cat and kittenhood which Cowper and Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold subsequently gave to the world. They are not even akin to Gray's famous lines, half mocking and half piteous, which deplore the untimely death of Walpole's Selima, "Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes." That Horace Walpole should have delighted in cats was inevitable. Their beauty, their refinement, their delicate appreciation of luxurious surroundings, could never have appealed more surely to any nature than to his. "Not English," was the censure habitually passed upon him by his contemporaries, to whom a taste for curios, and a distaste for hard drinking, were equally unintelligible eccentricities. Even that fine statesman, Lord Minto, pronounced him "a prim, precise, pretending, conceited savage; but a most un-English one;" and in proof, either of his primness, or of the gentle character of his savagery, Walpole loved and cherished cats. When his favourite met her tragic death, he wrote to Gray, bewailing the loss he had sustained; and the poet, in doubt as to which of his friend's cats had been drowned, replied with a playful letter