Here is a delightful discovery. The famed artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) kept, of all creatures, a wombat as a pet, which he loved with all his heart and soul.
He wrote, with considerable feeling:
I never reared a young Wombat To glad me with his pin-hole eye, But when he was most sweet and fat And, tail-less, he was sure to die!
So lamented the great man, to go with a drawing (now held by the British
