affected with any tenderness towards an animal which is its natural prey, is not so easy to determine.
This strange affection probably was occasioned by that desiderium, those tender maternal feelings, which the loss of her kittens had awakened in her breast; and by the complacency and ease she derived to herself from the procuring her teats to be drawn, which were too much distended with milk, till, from habit, she became as much delighted with this foundling as if it had been her real offspring.
This incident is no bad solution of that strange circumstance which grave historians as well as the poets assert, of exposed children being sometimes nurtured by female wild beasts that probably had lost their young. For it is not one whit more marvellous that Romulus and Remus, in their infant state, should be nursed by a she-wolf, than that a poor little sucking leveret should be fostered and cherished by a bloody grimalkin.
" . . . viridi fœtam Mavortis in antro
Procubuisse lupam: geminos huic ubera circum
Ludere pendentes pueros, et lambere matrem
Impavidos: illam tereti cervice reflexam
Mulcere alternos, et corpora fingere linguâ." [1]
NOTE TO LETTER XXXIV.
1 An incident told me by Mr. Harrett, of Kirkwhelpington, may well be told here. He has a fine colley bitch which had young ones. She was annoyed by a cat prowling about them, and killed it. This cat had one small kitten, which the maids tried to rear by hand in the kitchen. The bitch hearing its cries fetched it away and laid it among her own pups, suckling it until they were all weaned together, thus atoning as far as she could for the murder of its mother.
- ↑
"The cave of Mars was dressed with mossy greens:
There by the wolf were laid the martial twins,
Intrepid on her swellings dugs they hung;
The foster dam loll'd out her fawning tongue:
They suck'd secure, while bending back her head,
She lick'd their tender limbs; and formed them as they fed."
Dryd. Virg. Æn. viii. line 840.
