A Virtuoso's Collection

"A Virtuoso's Collection" is a short story by American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was first published in '' Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion'', I (May 1842), 193-200, and later included as the final story in the compilation ''Mosses from an Old Manse''.

The story references a number of historical and mythical figures, items, beasts, books, etc. as part of a museum collection. Some scholars regard the real-life museum of the East India Marine Society in Salem, Massachusetts, as a model for Hawthorne's fictional museum. The narrator is led through the collection by the virtuoso himself who turns out to be the Wandering Jew.

The collection

* 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 horns of the stag poached by Shakespeare
* 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"
* A griffin
* The dove that brought the olive branch to Noah to signify that the flood was receding
* Grip, the raven that belonged to Barnaby Rudge and later inspired Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven"
* The raven in which the soul of George I of Great Britain revisited his love, Melusine von der Schulenburg, Duchess of Kendal after his death
* Minerva's owl
* The vulture (or eagle) that daily ate Prometheus's liver
* The sacred ibis of Egypt
* One of the Stymphalian birds shot by Hercules. ''See'' Labours of Hercules
* Percy Bysshe Shelley's skylark from " To a Skylark"
* William Cullen Bryant's water-fowl from "To a Waterfowl"
* A pigeon, preserved by Nathaniel Parker Willis, from the belfry of Old South Church in Boston
* The albatross from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner''
* A domestic goose from the temple of Juno on the Capitoline Hill. Livy claimed these geese saved Rome from the Gauls around 390 BC.
* Robinson Crusoe's parrot
* A live phoenix
* A footless bird of paradise or Huma bird
* The peacock that once contained the soul of Pythagoras

Editions

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References

Bibliography

*Goluboff, Benjamin (1995). "'A Virtuoso's Collection': Hawthorne, History, and the Wandering Jew". ''Nathaniel Hawthorne Review'' 1995 Spring; 21 (1): 14-25. ISSN 0890-4197.
*McMurray, Price (2002). "'I Would Write on the Lintels of the Door-Post, Whim': History and Idealism in 'A Virtuoso's Collection'. ''Conference of College Teachers of English Studies''. 2002 September; 67: 32-42. ISSN 0092-8151.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Virtuoso's Collection
Short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne
1842 short stories
Works originally published in The Boston Miscellany