The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (50 page)

Very tractable to this lure I was trained, and put him not to the full anviling of me with any sound hammering persuasion, in that at the first sight of the top-gallant towers of Yarmouth, and a week before he had broken any of these words betwixt his teeth, my muse was ardently inflamed to do it some right; and how to bring it about fitter I knew not than in the praise of the red herring, whose proper soil and nursery it is. But this I must give you to wit, however I have took it upon me: that never since I spouted ink was I of worse aptitude to go through with such a mighty March-brewage as you expect, or temper you one right cup of that ancient wine of Falernum, which would last forty year, or consecrate to your fame a perpetual temple of the pine-trees of Ida,
¹⁵²
which never rot. For besides the loud bellowing prodigious flaw
¹⁵³
of indignation stirred up against me in my absence and extermination from the upper region of our celestial regiment, which hath dung
¹⁵⁴
me in a manner down to the infernal bottom of desolation, and so troubledly bemuddled with grief and care every cell or organ-pipe of my purer intellectual faculties, that no more they consort with any ingenuous playful merriments, of my note-books and all books else here in the country I am bereaved, whereby I might enamel and hatch-over this device more artificially and masterly, and attire it in his true orient varnish and tincture. Wherefore heart and good will, a workman is nothing without his tools. Had I my topics by me instead of my learned counsel to assist me, I might haps marshal my terms in better array, and bestow such costly coquery
¹⁵⁵
on this Marine Magnifico as you
would prefer him before tart and galingale,
¹⁵⁶
which Chaucer
¹⁵⁷
preheminentest encomionizeth
¹⁵⁸
above all junketries
¹⁵⁹
or confectionaries whatsoever.

Now you must accept of it as the place serves, and, instead of comfits and sugar to strew him with, take well in worth a farthing worth of flour to white him over and wamble
¹⁶⁰
him in, and I having no great pieces to discharge for his benvenue, or welcoming in, with this volley of Rhapsodies or small shot he must rest pacified, and so
ad rem
,
¹⁶¹
spur cut through thick and thin, and enter the triumphal chariot of the red herring.

HOMER of rats and frogs hath heroicked it.
¹⁶²
Other oaten pipers after him in praise of the gnat, the flea, the hazel-nut, the grasshopper, the butterfly, the parrot, the popinjay, Philip-sparrow, and the cuckoo; the wantoner sort of them sing descant on their mistress' glove, her ring, her fan, her looking glass, her pantofle,
¹⁶³
and on the same jury I might impanel Johannes Secundus,
¹⁶⁴
with his book of the two hundred kind of kisses. Philosophers come sneaking in with their paradoxes of poverty, imprisonment, death, sickness, banishment and baldness, and as busy they are about the bee, the stork, the constant turtle, the horse, the dog, the ape, the ass, the fox and the ferret. Physicians deafen our ears with the
Honorificabilitudinitatibus
¹⁶⁵
of their heavenly panachaea,
¹⁶⁶
their sovereign guaiacum,
¹⁶⁷
their glisters,
¹⁶⁸
their triacles,
¹⁶⁹
their mithridates
¹⁷⁰
of forty several poisons compacted, their bitter rhubarb and torturing stibium.
¹⁷¹

The posterior
¹⁷²
Italian and German cornugraphers
¹⁷³
stick not to
¹⁷⁴
applaud and cannonize unnatural sodomitry, the strumpet errant, the gout, the ague, the dropsy, the sciatica, folly, drunkenness, and slovenry. The Galli Gallinacei, or cocking French, swarm every pissing while
¹⁷⁵
in their primer editions,
Imprimeda iour duy
¹⁷⁶
of the unspeakable healthful conducibleness
¹⁷⁷
of the Gomorrian
¹⁷⁸
great
Poco, a Poco
,
¹⁷⁹
their true countryman every inch of him, the prescript laws of tennis or balonne
¹⁸⁰
(which is most of their gentlemen's chief livelihoods), the commodity of hoarseness, blear-eyes, scabbed hams, threadbare cloaks, potched eggs, and panados.
¹⁸¹
Amongst our English harmonious calinos
¹⁸²
one is up with the excellence of the brown bill
¹⁸³
and the long bow; another plays his prizes in print, in driving it home with all weapons in right of the noble science of defence; a third writes passing enamorately of the nature of white-meats,
¹⁸⁴
and justifies it under his hand to be bought and sold everywhere, that they exceed
nectar and ambrosia; a fourth comes forth with something in praise of nothing; a fifth of an enflamed heel
¹⁸⁵
to coppersmith's hall, all-to-berhymes
¹⁸⁶
it of the diversity of red noses, and the hierarchy of the rose magnificat. A sixth sweeps behind the door all earthly felicities, and makes baker's malkins
¹⁸⁷
of them, if they stand in competency with a strong dozen of points; marry, they must be points of the matter, you must consider, whereof the foremost cod-piss point is the crane's proverb in painted clothes, ‘Fear God and obey the King'; and the rest, some have tags and some have none. A seventh sets a tobacco pipe instead of a trumpet to his mouth, and of that divine drug proclaimeth miracles. An eighth capers it up to the spheres in commendation of dancing. A ninth offers sacrifice to the goddess Cloaca,
¹⁸⁸
and disports himself very scholarly and wittily about the reformation of close-stools
¹⁸⁹
and houses of office,
¹⁹⁰
and spicing and embalming their rank entrails that they stink not. A tenth sets forth remedies of toasted turves against famine.

To these I might wedge in Cornelius the Brabantine
¹⁹¹
who was feloniously suspected in '
87
for penning a discourse of tuftmockados, and a country gentleman of my acquaintance who is launching forth a treatise as big-garbed as the French Academy of
The Cornucopia of a Cow
and what an advantageable creature she is, beyond all the four-footed rabblement of herbagers and grass-champers (day nor night that she can rest for filing
¹⁹²
and tampering about it), as also a sworn brother of his that so bebangeth poor paper in laud of a bag-pudding,
¹⁹³
as a switzer
¹⁹⁴
would not believe
it. Neither of their decads are yet stamped, but ere midsummer term they will be, if their words be sure payment, and then tell me if our English sconces
¹⁹⁵
be not right Sheffield
¹⁹⁶
or no.

The application of this whole catalogue of waste authors is no more but this:
Quot capita tot sententiae
¹⁹⁷
(‘so many heads, so many whirligigs').
¹⁹⁸
And if all these have terlery-ginked
¹⁹⁹
it so frivolously of they recked not what, I may
cum gratia et priveligio
²⁰⁰
pronounce it, that a red herring is wholesome in a frosty morning, and rake up some few scattered syllables together in the exornation
²⁰¹
and polishing of it No more excursions and circumquaques
²⁰²
but
totaliter ad appositum
.
²⁰³

That English merchandise is most precious which no country can be without. If you ask Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Sussex, or Lemster or Cotswold what merchandise that should be, they will answer you it is the very same which Polidore Vergil calls
Vae aureum vellus
,
²⁰⁴
the true golden fleece of our wool and English cloth, and naught else. Other engrating
²⁰⁵
upland cormorants
²⁰⁶
will grunt out it is
grana paradisi
,
²⁰⁷
our grain or corn, that is most sought after. The westerners and northerners that it is lead, tin and iron. ‘Butter and cheese, butter and cheese!' saith the farmer. But from every one of these I dissent and will stoutly bide by it, that, to trowl in the cash throughout all nations of Christendom, there is no fellow to the red herring. The
French, Spanish, and Italian have wool enough of their own whereof they make cloth to serve their turn, though it be somewhat coarser than ours. For corn, none of the east parts but surpasseth us. Of lead and tin is the most scarcity in foreign dominions, and plenty with us, though they are not utterly barren of them. As for iron, about Isenborough
²⁰⁸
and other places of Germany they have quadruple the store that we have. As touching butter and cheese, the Hollanders cry ‘By your leave, we must go before you'; and the Transalpiners with their lordly parmasin (so named of the city of Parma in Italy where it is first clout-crushed
²⁰⁹
and made) shoulder in for the upper hand as hotly. Whenas, of our appropriate glory of the red herring, no region twixt the poles artic and antartic may, can, or will rebate from us one scruple.

On no coast like ours is it caught in such abundance, nowhere dressed in his right cue but under our horizon; hosted,
²¹⁰
roasted and toasted here alone it is, and as well powdered and salted as any Dutchman would desire. If you articulate with me of the gain or profit of it, without the which the newfanglest rarity, that nobody can boast of but ourselves, after three days gazing is reversed over to children for babies to play with. Behold, it is every man's money, from the King to the courtier. Every householder or good-man Baltrop,
²¹¹
that keeps a family in pay, casts for it as one of his standing provisions. The poorer sort make it three parts of their sustenance; with it, for his denier,
²¹²
the patchedest leather
piltche labaratho
²¹³
may dine like a Spanish duke, when the niggardliest mouse
²¹⁴
of beef will cost him sixpence. In the craft of catching or taking it, and smudging
²¹⁵
it merchant and chapmanable
²¹⁶
as it should be, it sets a-work thousands, who live all the rest of the year
gaily well by what in some few weeks they scratch up then, and come to bear office of questman
²¹⁷
and scavenger in the parish where they dwell; which they could never have done, but would have begged or starved with their wives and brats had not this captain of the squamy
²¹⁸
cattle so stood their good lord and master. Carpenters, shipwrights, makers of lines, ropes, and cables, dressers of hemp, spinners of thread, and net-weavers it gives their handfuls to, sets up so many salt-houses to make salt, and salt upon salt; keeps in earnings the cooper, the brewer, the baker, and numbers of other people, to gill, wash and pack it, and carry it, and recarry it.

In exchange of it from other countries they return wine and woads, for which is always paid ready gold, with salt, canvas, vitre,
²¹⁹
and a great deal of good trash.
²²⁰
Her Majesty's tributes and customs this
Semper Augustus
²²¹
of the seas' finny freeholders augmenteth and enlargeth uncountably, and to the increase of navigation for her service he is no enemy.

Voyages of purchase or reprisals, which are now grown a common traffic, swallow up and consume more sailors and mariners than they breed, and lightly not a slop of a rope-haler they send forth to the Queen's ships, but he is first broken to the sea in the herring man's skiff or cock-boat, where having learned to brook all waters, and drink as he can out of a tarry can, and eat poor-John out of swuttie
²²²
platters, when he may get it, without butter or mustard, there is no ho
²²³
with him, but, once heartened thus, he will needs be a man of war, or a tobacco-taker, and wear a silver whistle. Some of these for their haughty climbing come home with wooden legs, and some with none, but leave body and all behind. Those that escape to bring news tell of nothing but eating tallow and young blackamoors, of five and five to a rat in every mess, and the ship-boy to the
tail, of stopping their noses when they drank stinking water that came out of the pump of the ship, and cutting a greasy buff jerkin in tripes and broiling it for their dinners. Divers Indian adventures have been seasoned with direr mishaps, not having for eight days' space the quantity of a candle's end among eight-score to grease their lips with; and landing in the end to seek food, by the cannibal savages they have been circumvented, and forced to yield their bodies to feed them.

Our mitred Archpatriarch, Leopold Herring, exacts no such muscovian vassalage of his liegemen, though he put them to their trumps
²²⁴
other while, and scuppets
²²⁵
not his benefice into their mouths with such freshwater facility as Master Ascham in his
Schoolmaster
would imply. His words are these in his censure upon Varro: ‘He enters not,' saith he, ‘into any great depth of eloquence, but as one carried in a small low vessel by himself very nigh the common shore, not much unlike the fishermen of Rie, or herring men of Yarmouth, who deserve by common men's opinion small commendation for any cunning sailing at all.' Well, he was Her. Majesty's schoolmaster, and a St John's man in Cambridge, in which house once I took up my inn for seven year together lacking a quarter, and yet love it still, for it is and ever was the sweetest nurse of knowledge in all that University. Therefore I will keep fair quarter with him, and expostulate the matter more tamely.
Memorandum non ab uno
:
²²⁶
I vary not a minim from him, that, in the captious mystery of Monsieur Herring, low vessels will not give their heads for the washing,
²²⁷
holding their own pell-mell in all weathers as roughly as vaster timber-men, though not so near the shore as, through ignorance of the coast, he soundeth, nor one man by himself alone to do everything, which is the opinion of one man by himself alone, and not believed of any other. Five to one, if he were alive, I would beat against him, since one without five is as good as none,
to govern the most eggshell shallop that floateth, and spread her nets and draw them in. As stiffly could I controvert it with him about pricking his card so badly in Cape Norfolk or
Sinus Yarmouthiensis
and discrediting our countrymen for shorecreepers, like these Colchester oystermen, or whiting-mongers and sprot-catchers.
²²⁸
Solyman Herring, would you should persuade yourselves, is loftier minded and keepeth more aloof than so. And those that are his followers, if they will seek him where he is, more than common danger they must incur in close driving under the sands which alternately or betwixt times, when he is disposed to ensconce himself, are his entrenched randevowe
²²⁹
or castle of retiring; and otherwhile forty or threescore leagues in the roaring territory they are glad on their wooden horses to post after him, and scour it with their ethiope pitchboards
²³⁰
till they be windless in his quest and pursuing. Returning from waiting on him, have with you to the Adriatic and abroad everywhere far and near to make port-sail
²³¹
of their perfumed smoky commodities, and, that toil rocked asleep, they are for Ultima Thule,
²³²
the north-seas, or Iceland, and thence yerk over
²³³
that worthy
Pallamede don pedro de linge
,
²³⁴
and his worshipful nephew Hugo Haberdine,
²³⁵
and a trundle-tail
²³⁶
tyke
²³⁷
or shaugh
²³⁸
or two, and towards Michlemas scud home to catch herring again. This argues they should have some experience of navigation, and are not such halcyons to build their nests all on the shore as Master Ascham supposeth.