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For he is of the tribe of Tiger.

For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.

For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.

For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.

For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.

Of course Smart can hardly be considered typical, since he was an alcoholic, and insane, and at the time was locked up in Bedlam with only Jeoffry for company. Still, no one suggested burning either of them for his sentiments.

Toward the end of the century Dr. Johnson, as sane as Pepys and not a man given to exercise for its own sake, was going out in person to buy oysters for Hodge, lest the servants take a spiteful dislike to the cat from being put to the effort.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the cat has so far lost its evil connotations as to be patronized by the likes of Robert Southey, Poet Laureate of England, who burbled, “A kitten is in the animal world what a rosebud is in a garden.” The cat may have been relieved not to be made into bonfires, but one can imagine a quick twitch of irritation at the tip of the tail for being called a rosebud.

Cats were in for a sentimental spell. True, Baudelaire in mid-century wrote respectfully in Fleurs du Mal:

Stretched pensively in noble attitudes,

Like sphinxes dreaming in their solitudes,

He seems to ponder in an endless trance;

With magic sparks his fecund loins are filled,

And, like fine sand, bright golden atoms gild

With vague and starry rays his mystic glance.

But Baudelaire was French. In Victorian times a suffocating wave of coziness settled over the English-speaking world, all mysteries lost their darkness, and the cat became as tame as a teapot and, to judge from the paintings, shaped rather like one. Saucers of cream and the company of women and children became its lot; no

parlor scene was complete without an overfed cat. Kittens played with balls of yarn. Pretty girls fondled them. We descend from Jeoffry, servant of the Living God and term of the Angel Tiger, to

I like little pussy,

Her coat is so warm,

And if I don’t hurt her

She’ll do me no harm.

So I’ll not pull her tail,

Nor drive her away,

But pussy and I

Very gently will play.

The fierce and lordly Ra-cat had become a young lady, Freya’s lusts had been sanitized into family life, and even the valuable hunting instincts had fallen into disrepute; it was considered not quite nice of cats to kill, a deplorable sideline to their proper role as cuddly toys on lap and cushion. Since neutering was uncommon, one wonders how the always noisy and explicit personal sex life of the cat fit into the parlor portrait; nothing is more educational for the young to observe than the magic sparks of those fecund loins, and nothing was less appealing to Victorians than sex education.

We may safely assume that the cat was no cozier in 1880 than it was diabolical in 1380; the cat is not malleable to human opinion. In the Middle Ages when it got the chance it sat on laps; in the nineteenth century when it got the chance it howled on rooftops and ripped open mice.

The twentieth century was a mixed bag. Veterinary medicine sprang up from virtually nowhere, and eventually turned its attention to cats and began to distinguish their diseases from those of dogs. Vaccines were developed against the great killers like feline enteritis, though they’re no use unless someone pays to have them actually administered to the individual cat. Antibiotics arrived for the same privileged few. Cat food, at first an unwholesome, inadequate brew of ground fish scraps, caught the eye of commercial enterprise and improved, and the domestic cat’s previous diet of cold noodles, applesauce, fat, and gristle, scraped from a plate, passed into history for the lucky; whole books were to be written on cat nutrition.

On the other side of the balance, the twentieth century brought the car.

The car has changed the cat’s life