And the annotator on this passage, in explanation, adds, that ’Montaigne in his Essays supposes his cat thought him a fool for losing his time in playing with her;’ but, under favour, this is a misinterpretation of the essayist’s sentiment, and something like a libel on the capacity of both himself and cat.  Montaigne’s words are:  ’When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?  We mutually divert each other with our play.  If I have my hour to begin or refuse, so also has she hers.’  Nobody who has read the striking essay in which these words appear could for a moment misconceive their author’s meaning.  He is vindicating natural theology from the objections of some of its opponents, and in the course of his argument he takes occasion to dwell on the wonderful instincts, and almost rational sagacity of the inferior animals.  We must, however, lament that, although he does full justice to the ‘half-reasoning elephant,’ to the aptitude and fidelity of the dog, to the marvellous economical arrangements of the bees, and even to the imitative capacity of the magpie, he pays no higher tribute to the merits of the cat than that she is as capable of being amused as himself, and like himself, too, has her periods of gravity when recreative sports are distasteful.  Her social qualities he does not allude to, though he, so eminently social himself, could scarcely have failed to appreciate them.

In this country, at this time, cats have superseded parlour favourites decidedly less agreeable in their appearance, and infinitely more mischievous in their habits.  Writing in the seventeenth century, Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, remarks that ’Turkey gentlewomen, that are perpetual prisoners, still mewed up according to the custom of the place, have little else, beside their household business or to play with their children, to drive away time but to dally with their cats, which they have in delitiis, as many of our ladies and gentlewomen use monkeys and little dogs.’  It is not the least merit of the cat that it has banished from our sitting-rooms those frightful mimicries of humanity—­the monkey tribe; and as to the little dogs Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, although we are not insensible to their many virtues and utilities, we care not to see them sleeping on our hearth-rug, or reposing beside our work-tables.

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[Footnote 5:  In the matter of fanaticism, the modern Egyptians, or rather the inhabitants of Alexandria, seem hardly to have degenerated from their ethnic ‘forbears,’ as we read in Mr J.A.  St John’s travels the account of a serious insurrection which broke out some years ago in that city, in consequence of certain Jews having taken up the butcher’s trade, and having slain the meat with a knife having three instead of five nails in the handle!]

BEGGARS IN THE FAR EAST.