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