Selima

Selima was the beloved tabby cat of the 18th-century writer and politician Horace Walpole, and she owes her fame to a single, fatal moment of curiosity. According to the story, Selima was peering into a large ornamental tub of goldfish at Walpole's home when she overbalanced, tumbled in, and drowned. Walpole's friend, the poet Thomas Gray, marked her death in 1747 with the mock-heroic "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes" — a gently comic poem that treats the small domestic tragedy with grand classical solemnity. The poem became enormously popular and remains one of the most anthologised cat poems ever written, ending with the wry, often-quoted moral that "a favourite has no friend" and that "not all that tempts your wandering eyes / And heedless hearts is lawful prize." Walpole so treasured the verses that he kept the very goldfish tub at his Gothic villa, Strawberry Hill, with Gray's lines inscribed on its pedestal. Through Gray's wit, an ordinary house cat's mishap became a piece of literary history, and Selima joined the small company of cats whose names have outlived their owners.