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 Rh was "absolutely composed of cats." And he it was whose passionate love-songs banished slumber from the eyes of men, and stirred the gentle Ettrick Shepherd into an unwonted fury of denunciation. "I've often thocht it aneuch to sicken ane o' love a' their days," he observes indignantly in the "Noctes," "just to reflect that a' that hissin', and spitting, and snuffing, and squeaking, and squealing, and howling, and growling, and groaning, a' mixed up into ae infernal gallemaufry o' din, onlike onything else even in this noisy world, was wi' these creatures the saftest, sweetest expression o' the same tender passion that from Adam's lips whispered persuasion into Eve's ear, in the bowers o' Paradise."

Perhaps, indeed, much of the unreasonable fear and hatred with which the mediæval peasant regarded his cat may be traceable to its extraordinary vocal powers. Those long-drawn notes which suddenly pierce the silence of the night, so inhumanly human in their swelling cadences; those rising tides of passion, those sudden plunges into unveiled horror,—what wonder that they carried consternation to minds always attuned to the supernatural! One remembers how Coleridge wrote of the cats of Malta, who were in the habit of meeting under his bedroom window, and to whose nocturnal symphonies he listened with quaking heart. "It is the discord of Torment, and of Rage, and of Hate, of