"I am credibly informed that there was once a design of casting
into an opera the story of Whittington and his Cat, and that in
order to it there had been got together a great quantity of mice;
but Mr. Rich, the proprietor of the playhouse, very prudently
considered that it would be impossible for the cat to kill them
all, and that consequently the princes of the stage might be as
much infested with mice as the prince of the island was before the
cat's arrival upon it; for which reason he would not permit it to
be acted in his house."--_Spectator_ (No. 5, March 6, 1711).

The Rev. Samuel Pegge brought the subject of Whittington and his Cat
before a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries in 1771, but he could
make nothing at all of the cat. There is no record of the inquiry in the
_Archaeologia_, but it is mentioned in a letter from Gough to Tyson, 27
Dec. 1771 (Nichols's _Literary Anecdotes_, vol. viii. p. 575). Horace
Walpole was annoyed at the Society for criticising his "Richard III."
and in his _Short Notes on his Life_ he wrote--"Foote having brought
them on the stage for sitting in council, as they had done on
Whittington and his Cat, I was not sorry to find them so ridiculous, or
to mark their being so, and upon that nonsense, and the laughter that
accompanied it, I struck my name out of their book."

Foote brought out his comedy of _The Nabob_ at the Haymarket Theatre in
1772. Sir Matthew Mite, the hero of the piece, is elected a member of
the Society of Antiquaries, and delivers an address on Whittington and
his Cat in which he gave the following solution of the difficulty:--"The
commerce this worthy merchant carried on was chiefly confined to our
coasts. For this purpose he constructed a vessel which for its agility
and lightness he aptly christened a cat. Nay, to this our day,