I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive; finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house, and “Tom 7, or Tom 11, or Tom 14 by the grace of God King,” would sound as well as it would when applied to the ordinary royal tomcat with tights on.

“And as a rule,” said he, in his neat modern English, “the character of these cats would be considerably above the character of the average king, and this