For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.Christopher SmartFor thousands of years writers have delighted in the company of cats, observing all the quirks of their behaviour from kittenish play to the silent stalk of the night hunter. The place of the domestic cat in Western households has inspired great poets, novelists and short-story writers to invent classic fictional cats just as charming and aloof as their real-life equivalents.This anthology ranges widely across world literature and includes classic authors as well as less familiar voices. Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Eleanor Farjeon and Edgar Allan Poe evoke deeply differing versions of the bond between house cat and human; D. H. Lawrence and Richard Adams immortalise the cat as hunter - and hunted; and William Blake and the Brothers Grimm celebrate the wilder magic of tigers and lions.