In February 1747, Selima the tabby fell into a Chinese porcelain tub in Walpole's Mayfair house and never returned to dry land. The poem by Thomas Gray, ''Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold-fishes'', was written as her epitaph. Here is the true history of the event, and a look at the sparking social and cultural life of the period. The book is beautifully illustrated with Richard Bentleys original series of designs for the poem, William Blake's wonderful watercolours of some fifty years later, and the unpublished illustrations produced in the 1940s by Kathleen Hale, of ''Orlando the Cat'' fame.