Complete. From “Essays and Marginalia.”

SLEEP thou in peace, my sable Selima; rest and be thankful, for thou wert born in an enlightened age, and in a family of females and elderly gentlemen. Well is it for thee that thou wert not cotemporary with the pious Baxter, that detester of superstition; or the learned Sir Thomas Brown, the exploder of vulgar errors; or the great Sir Matthew Hale, whose wholesome severities against half-starved sorceresses so aptly illustrated his position, that Christianity is “parcel of the common law of England”; rest, I say, and be thankful, for the good old times had been bitter times for thee.

  Why should color excite the malignant passions of man? Why will the sole patentee of reason, the soi disant lord of creation, degrade himself to the level of the turkey cock, that is filled with rage and terror at a shred of scarlet? What is a hue—an absorbed reflected ray, or, as other sages tell, a mere extended thought—that we should love or hate it? Yet such is man, with all his boasted wisdom. Ask why the negro is a slave. He’s black, not like a Christian. Why should Bridget’s cat be worried? Why, to be sure, she’s black, an imp of darkness, the witch’s own familiar; nay, perhaps, the witch herself in disguise; a thing most easily put to proof; for if you knock out Grimalkin’s eye, Bridget will appear next day with only one; maim the cat, its mistress halts; stab it, she is wounded. Such are the dangers of necromantic masquerading, when the natural body is punished with the stripes inflicted on the assumed one: and this was once religion with royal chaplains, and philosophy with the Royal Society!

  These superstitions are gone; this baseless fabric of a vision is dissolved; I wish that it had left not a wreck behind. But when Satan disappears an unsavory scent remains behind him; and from the carcass of buried absurdity, there often proceeds an odor of prejudice—the more distressing because we know not whence it comes. Neither elderly ladies nor black cats are now suspected of witchcraft; yet how seldom are they fully restored to their just estimation in the world.

  Be it perverseness, or be it pity, or be it regard for injured merit, I confess myself an advocate for the human tabbies, so famed for loquacity, and for their poor dumb favorites in black velvet.

  Whether it be true that Time, which has such various effects on divers subjects, which is so friendly to wine, and so hostile to small beer, which turns abuse to right, and usurpation to legitimacy, which improves pictures while it mars their originals, and raises a coin no longer current to a hundred times the value it ever went for;—whether this wonder-working Time be able to deface the loveliness of woman, shall be a subject for future inquiry. But, my pretty Selima; thou that, like Solomon’s bride, art black, but comely; thee, and thy kind—the sable order of the feline sisterhood, I would gladly vindicate from those aspersions, which take occasion from the blackness of thy coat to blacken thy reputation.

  Thy hue denotes thee a child of night; Night, the wife of Chaos, and, being a female, of course the oldest female in being. How aptly, therefore, dost thou become the favorite of those ladies, who, though not so old as night, are nevertheless in the evening of their days. Thou dost express thy joy at the return of thy mother, even as the statue of Memnon at the approach of her rival, frisking about in thy mourning garb by moonlight, starlight, or no light, an everlasting merry mourner; and yet a mute in dress, and silence too, not belying thy name by volubility.

  How smooth, how silky soft are thy jetty hairs! A peaceful multitude, wherein each knows its place, and none obstructs its neighbors. Thy very paws are velvet, and seem formed to walk on carpets of tissue. What a pretty knowing primness in thy mouth, what quick turns of expression in thy ears, and what maiden dignity in thy whiskers. Were it not for thine emerald eyes, and that one white hair on thy breast, which I abstain from comparing to a single star in a cloudy sky, or a water lily lying on a black lake (for, in truth, it is like neither), I should call thee nature’s monochrome. And then the manifold movements of thy tail, that hangs out like a flag of truce, and the graceful sinuosity of thy carriage, all bespeak thee of the gentle kind. False tokens all: thou canst be furious as a negro despot; thy very hairs, if crossed, flash fire. Thou art an earth-pacing thunder-cloud, a living electric battery; thy back is armed with the wrath of Jove.

  Hence do thy enemies find occasion to call thee a daughter of darkness, clad in Satan’s livery—a patch on the fair face of nature; and therefore an unseemly relic of a fashion, not only unbecoming in itself, but often perverted to the purposes of party.

  Yet, my Selima, if thy tribe have suffered much from the follies of mankind, they have profited by them also. If the dark age looked black upon them; if the age of black arts, black friars, and black letter set them in its black book, and delivered over their patronesses to the blackness of darkness; yet time hath been when they partook of the honor and worship paid to all their species, while they walked in pride at the base of the pyramids, or secreted their kittens in the windings of the labyrinth. Then was their life pleasant, and their death as a sweet odor.

  This was, indeed, common to all thy kind, however diversified by color, or divided by condition. Tabby and tortoise-shell, black, white, and gray, tawny and sandy, gib and grimalkin, ye were a sacred race, and the death of one of you was mourned as a brother’s—if natural; and avenged as a citizen’s—if violent; and this is in the cradle of the sciences (so called, I presume, because the sciences were babies there), and in spite of the seven hundred thousand volumes of Alexandria.

  Yet I cannot but think that the wise Egyptians distinguished black with peculiar reverence. We know that their religion, like their writing, was hieroglyphical; that their respect for various animals was merely symbolical; that under the form of the ox, they gratefully remembered the inventor of agriculture, and adopted a beetle as the representative of the sun. Now, of how many virtues, how many powers, how many mysteries may not a black cat be an emblem? As she is cat, of vigilance; as she is black, of secrecy; as both, of treachery, one of the greatest of political virtues, if we judge from the high rewards continually given and daily advertised for it. Again, we know the annual circle, and the signs by which it was measured, was another object of idolatry; but one ample half of time is typified by a black cat.

  But should these deep speculations be deemed mystical by the present age, which, if it be an age of light, is certainly an age of lightness, it may at least be admitted that the Egyptians would prefer their own color, and we are assured by Volney and others that they were not only black, but literally negroes.

  As for the esteem they entertained for cats in general, we may account for it on the supposition that they were delivered, at some period of their history, in an extraordinary manner, from a swarm of rats, either national or political. And that the agents of this deliverance were represented under the feline figure, which may be plausibly considered as a bodily representative of the spirit of reform.

  After all, Selima, I doubt whether thou hast lost as much by never being worshiped as thou hast gained by living in a Christian country. State is burdensome, and superstition is seldom prone to regard its objects with affection.

  But there is one of thy hue whose condition might have been envied by all the sacred mousers of Egypt. Well may she be proud and coy whom fate has appointed, not to be the idol of the children of Ham, but the favorite of the loveliest of the daughters of Britain.