Cats details

A group of cats gathers round an open music book to sing christmas carols. A trombone, violin, banjo and other instruments are visible, along with playing cards. Some mice play nearby.

From p. 1100:

“In the “Orleans Collection” of pictures there was a fine painting of a “Concert of Cats,” by F. Breughel, from whence there is a print, among the engravings of that gallery, sufficiently meritorious and whimsical to deserve a place here: and therefore it is represented in the sketch on the present page. In justice, to the justice done to it, Mr. Samuel Williams must be mentioned as the artist who both drew and engraved it. The fixed attention of the feline performers is exceedingly amusing, and by no means unnatural; for it appears by the notes that mice is their theme, and they seem engaged in a catch.

A poem printed beneath the sketch reads as follows:

Breughel’s Concert of Cats.
Ye cats, in triumph elevate your ears!
Exult, ye mice! for fate’s abhorred shears
Of Dick’s nine lives have slit the cat-guts nine!
Henceforth he mews midst choirs of chats divine!