A Virtuoso's Collection

"A Virtuoso's Collection" is the final short story in Mosses from an Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was first published in "Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion", I (May, 1842), 193-200. The story references a number of historical and mythical figures, items, beasts, books, etc. as part of a museum collection. The narrator is lead through the collection by the virtuoso himself who turns out to be the Wandering Jew.

The Collection

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* Opportunity, by the ancient sculptor Lysippus
* The wolf that devoured Little Red Riding Hood
* The she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus
* Edmund Spenser's 'milk-white lamb' which Una led in "The Faerie Queene"
* Alexander the Great's Bucephalus
* Don Quixote's horse Rosinante
* The donkey from William Wordsworth's Peter Bell: A Tale
* The donkey from Book of Numbers chapter 22 that was beaten by Balaam
* Argus, Ulysses' dog
* Cerberus
* The fox from Aesop's fable The Fox Who Lost Its Tail
* Dr. Samuel Johnson's cat Hodge
* The cat who saved Muhammad from a snake, or Muezza, the Prophet's pet. Perhaps both cats are in the collection.
* Thomas Gray's inspiration for the poem Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes. The cat, Selima, belonged to Horace Walpole
* Sir Walter Scott's cat Hinse
* Puss in Boots
* Bast, the Egyptian sun and war goddess, in her cat form
* George Gordon Byron's pet bear
* The Erymanthean Boar
* St. George's Dragon. "See" Saint George and the Dragon
* Python
* The serpent which tempted Eve
* The horn's of the stag poached by Shakespeare [http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/rowe.htm]
* The shell of the tortoise that supposedly killed Aeschylus
* Apis, an Egyptian bull-deity
* "The cow with the crumpled horn" from the nursery rhyme This Is The House That Jack Built
* The cow that jumped over the moon from the nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle