Suspicion seems to have been cast on the cat in the second half of the century, and it is interesting to find Goldsmith ("On Education", 1759) advocating instead of romances "the old story of Whittington, _were his cat left out_" as "more serviceable to the tender mind than either Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, or a hundred others, where frugality is the only good quality the hero is not possessed of".
