Page:The fireside sphinx.djvu/75

 Rh cats, all equally unrecognizable, but all alike glutted with prey. Thus they handed down to posterity the disquiet of their souls, without risking the short, stern shrift of an ecclesiastical court.

The theory, like most theories, is entertaining; but even heresy can hardly be said to have given the cat her due. She was practically banished from cathedrals, save at Rouen, where we find her bravely chasing a mouse around one of the pillars in the nave. A careful search will also reveal her occasional presence in the beautiful old choir stalls, where the genius of the mediæval wood-carver resolved itself into an infinite capacity for taking pains. Amid the riotous groups of greyhounds, monkeys, and birds, we may see her—though very rarely—curled up in a recess, or springing with splendid freedom amid a network of oaken leaves. There are two very droll cats in the choir of the old Minster in the Isle of Thanet; and on one of the stalls of Great Malvern church a pair of rats are engaged in the congenial task of gibbeting a cat,—"le monde bestorné," as this reversal of a natural law was called in ancient France.

Venice gives us a much finer exception in the superb choir-stalls of San Georgio Maggiore, carved by Albert de Brule at the very close of the sixteenth century, when prejudice and superstition were losing their ancient hold. They represent scenes