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In 1747 Thomas Gray wrote one of the most famous elegies of the eighteenth century. The individual he memorialized was not an author, a statesman, or an artist; she was Horace Walpole's cat, Selima, who had drowned after falling into a goldfish bowl. Gray's poem vividly and humorously describes the cat's attraction to the flash of color in the tub-"What female heart can gold despise?"-as well as her eventual demise when no one comes to rescue her. And it concludes with a moralizing warning: "From hence, ye beauties, undeceiv'd,/ Know, one false step is ne'er retriev'd,/ And be with caution bold./ Not all, that tempts your wand'ring eyes/ And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;/ Nor all, that glisters, gold."1 Gray's poem is, at least in part, a jeu d'esprit, a fanciful literary exercise meant to demonstrate the author's wit or verbal dexterity. It is satirical, with a focus on feminine weakness. Yet its tone is also sympathetic toward the cat, which doubtless helps account for its enduring popularity throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. And its moral seeks to move beyond the specific instance of one real cat into the realm of human, as well as animal, experience.
Gray's elegy for Selima encapsulates several themes present to varying degrees in elegies and epitaphs for pets throughout the eighteenth century. Such works help us understand how people thought about the relationship between humans and animals, and how that thinking changed over the century. These ideas both reflected and influenced broader cultural changes during the period. As ideas about animals and nature were transformed, satires increasingly gave way to works dominated by sentiment and by an emphasis on close bonds between human and beast. Throughout this period, writing about animals helped people to write about themselves, but the use of such works changed. Pets were used less to point up human follies than to demonstrate human virtues, including the virtue of experiencing a special bond with animals. Over time, there was also an increasing emphasis on the individual animals themselves, not just on the universal virtues and morals they were believed to exemplify. With the spread of modern pet keeping in the eighteenth century came poetry that celebrated animals simply for being loved companions and friends.
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