ment of Jan Fyt's work with that of the "Poulterer's Shop," by Van Mieris, which hangs in the National Gallery of London, and in which a pretty tortoise-shell pussy, soft-furred and innocent-eyed, looks wistfully at a dead duck hanging well out of her reach. The Flemish painter felt, and felt with reluctant admiration, the lawlessness of the animals he drew; the Dutchman transferred to canvas his own sleepy pet, curled up in the warmest corner of his hearth. His cat is as gentle, for all her greed, as is that comfortable beast, so drowsy and unconcerned, in Jordaens's tumultuous "Twelfth Night;" or the mother puss who watches her five kittens with tender and over-anxious solicitude in Jan Steen's equally uproarious "Revellers."
Such pictures seem made for cats. To paint a kitchen without one would be like painting a meadow without cows. Worse, indeed; for there is no such air of destitution, of utter and melancholy incompleteness about a cowless meadow, as about a catless kitchen. No effort of imagination was needed to introduce Pussy into a Dutch interior. She was there by virtue of natural selection, of justifiable and inevitable proprietorship; but to gently insinuate her into the company of saints and angels required more courage, or more affection. Only now and then an early Flemish painter ventured upon such a flight of fancy. There is in
