Page:The fireside sphinx.djvu/164

 138 is still often called a Cyprus cat; though the cloth woven of hair and silk in wavy lines, and originally brought from Cyprus, (as were many cats,) has disappeared from English markets for perhaps two hundred years. Cats can be "brindled tortoise-shell," and are occasionally so described; though, when well-bred, the colour lies in broad deep blotches, rather than in bars. That Gray did not mean to indicate Selima's sex by the word tabby—an inaccuracy of which the precise little poet was wholly incapable—is proven by the letter in which he refers to Fatima and Selima, both plainly females, and says, "I would rather seem to mistake, and to imagine to be sure it must be the tabby one that has met with this sad accident."

After Herrick, no English poet seems to have fully recognized the domestic qualities of the cat until Cowper paid her his litttle tribute of song. From Goldsmith, indeed, we have the pretty verse which illustrates his cheerful British conception of a hermitage.

But Cowper is more explicit. The well-ordered household at Olney must necessarily have been dominated by a cat. It offered precisely the