The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (52 page)

Hydra herring will have everything
*
Sybarite-dainty, where he lays knife aboard, or he will fly them, he will not look upon them. Stately born, stately sprung he is, the best blood of the Ptolemies no statelier, and with what state he hath been used from his swaddling clouts I have reiterated unto you, and, which is a not-above-
ela
, stately Hyperion or the lordly sun, the most rutilant
³⁰⁸
planet of the seven,
³⁰⁹
in Lent when Heralius
³¹⁰
Herring enters into his chief reign and sceptredom, skippeth and danceth the goat's jump
³¹¹
on the earth for joy of his entrance. Do but mark him on your walls any morning at that season, how he sallies and lavoltoes,
³¹²
and you will say I am no fabler. Of so eye-bewitching deaurate
³¹³
ruddy dye is the skincoat of this lantsgrave,
³¹⁴
that happy is that nobleman who for his colours in armoury can nearest imitate his chimical
³¹⁵
temper. Nay, which is more, if a man should tell you that god Hymen's saffron-coloured robe were made of nothing but red herrings' skins, you would hardly believe him. Such is the obduracy and hardness of heart of a number of infidels in these days, they will tear herrings out of their skins as fast as one of these exchequer-tellers can turn over a heap of money; but his virtues, both exterior and interior, they have no more taste of than of a dish of stockfish.

Somewhere I have snatched up a jest of a king that was
desirous to try what kind of flesh-meat was most nutritive-prosperous with a man's body, and to that purpose he commanded four hungry fellows in four separate rooms by themselves to be shut up for a year and a day, whereof the first should have his gut bombasted with beef and nothing else till he cried ‘Hold, belly, hold,' and so the second to have his paunch crammed with pork, the third with mutton, and the fourth with veal. At the twelvemonth's end they were brought before him, and he enquired of every one orderly what he had eat. Therewith out stepped the stallfed foreman that had been at host with the fat oxe, and was grown as fat as an oxe with tiring on the sirloins, and baft
³¹⁶
in his face ‘Beef, beef, beef'. Next the Norfolk hog or the swine-worrier, who had got him a sagging pair of cheeks like a sow's paps that give suck, with the plentiful mast set before him, came lazily waddling in and puffed out ‘Pork, pork, pork'. Then the sly sheep-biter issued into the midst, and summer-setted
³¹⁷
and flipflapt
³¹⁸
it twenty times above ground, as light as a feather, and cried ‘Mitton, mitton, mitton'. Last the Essex calf or lagman,
³¹⁹
who had lost the calves of his legs with gnawing on the horselegs, shuddering and quaking, limped after, with a visage as pale as a piece of white leather, and a staff in his hand and a kerchief on his head, and very lamentably vociferated ‘Veal, veal, veal'. A witty toy of his noble Grace it was, and different from the recipes and prescriptions of our modern physicians, that to any sick languishers, if they be able to waggle their chaps, propound veal for one of the highest nourishers.

But had his principality gone through with fish as well as flesh, and put a man to livery with the red herring but as long, he would have come in
*
‘Hurrey,
³²⁰
Hurrey, Hurrey',
as if he were harrying and chasing his enemies, and Bevis of Hampton,
³²¹
after he been out of his diet, should not have been able to have stood before him. A choleric parcel of food it is, that whoso ties himself to rack and manger to for five summers and five winters, he shall beget a child that will be a soldier and a commander before he hath cast his first teeth, and an Alexander, a Julius Caesar, a Scanderbeg,
³²²
a Barbarossa he will prove ere he aspire to thirty.

But to think on a red herring, such a hot stirring meat it is, is enough to make the cravenest dastard proclaim fire and sword against Spain. The most intenerate
³²³
virgin-wax phisnomy, that taints his throat with the least rib of it, it will embrawn and iron-crust his flesh, and harden his soft bleeding veins as stiff and robustious as branches of coral. The art of kindling of fires that is practised in the smoking or parching of him is old dog
³²⁴
against the plague. Too foul-mouthed I am to becollow
³²⁵
or becollier
³²⁶
him with such chimney sweeping attributed of smoking and parching. Will you have the secret of it? This well-meaning
Pater patriae
, and providitor and supporter of Yarmouth, which is the lock and key of Norfolk, looking pale and sea-sick at his first landing, those that be his stewards or necessariest men about him, whirl him in a thought out of the raw cold air, to some stew or hot-house, where immuring himself for three or four days, when he unhouseth him or hath cast off his shell, he is as freckled about the gills, and looks as red as a fox, clum,
³²⁷
and is more surly to be spoken with than ever he was before, and, like Lais of Corinth,
³²⁸
will smile upon no man except he may have his own asking. There are that number of herrings vented out of Yarmouth every year,
though the grammarians make no plural number of Halec, as not only they are more by two thousand last than our own land can spend, but they fill all other lands, to whom at their own prices they sell them, and happy is he that can first lay hold of them.

And how can it be otherwise? For if Cornish pilchards, otherwise called fumadoes, taken on the shore of Cornwall from July to November, be so saleable as they are in France, Spain and Italy, which are but counterfeits to the red herring, as copper to gold, or ockamie
³²⁹
to silver, much more their elbows itch for joy, when they meet with the true gold, the true red herring itself. No true flying fish but he, or if there be, that fish never flies but when his wings are wet, and the red herring flies best when his wings are dry. Throughout Belgia, High Germany, France, Spain and Italy he flies, and up into Greece and Africa, South and Southwest estritch-like, walks his stations,
³³⁰
and the sepulchre palmers or pilgrims, because he is so portable, fill their scrips
³³¹
with them; yea no dispraise to the blood of the Ottomans, the Nabuchedonesor of Constantinople and giantly Antaeus,
³³²
that never yawneth nor neezeth,
³³³
but he affrighteth the whole earth, gormandizing, muncheth him up for imperial dainties, and will not spare his idol Mahomet a bit with him, no, not though it would fetch him from heaven forty years before his time; whence, with his dove that he taught to peck barley out of his ear, and brought his disciples into a fool's paradise that it was the Holy Ghost in her similitude, he is expected every minute to descend, but I am afraid as he was troubled with the falling sickness in his lifetime, in self manner it took him in his mounting up to heaven and so
ab inferno nulla redemptio
,
³³⁴
he is fallen backward into hell and they are never more like to hear of him.

Whiles I am shuffling and cutting with these long–coated Turks, would any antiquary would explicate unto me this remblere
³³⁵
or quiddity,
³³⁶
whether those turbanto
*
grout-heads,
³³⁷
that hang all men by the throats on iron hooks, even as our towers hang all their herrings by the throats on wooden spits, first learned it of our herring men, or our herring men of them. Why the Alcheronship of that Belzabub of Saracens, Rhinoceros Zelim aforesaid, should so much delight in this shiny animal, I cannot guess, except he had a desire to imitate Midas in eating of gold, or Dionysius in stripping Jupiter out of his golden coat. And, to shoot my fool's bolt amongst you, that fable of Midas eating gold had no other shadow or inclusive pith in it, but he was of a queasy stomach and nothing he could fancy but this newfound gilded fish, which Bacchus at his request gave him (though it were not known here two thousand year after, for it was the delicates of the gods, and no mortal food till of late years). Midas, unexperienced of the nature of it, for he was a fool that had ass's ears, snapped it up at one blow, and because in the boiling or seething of it in his maw he felt it commotion a little and upbraid him, he thought he had eaten gold indeed, and thereupon directed his orisons to Bacchus afresh, to help it out of his crop again, and have mercy upon him and recover him. He, propensive inclining to Midas' devotion in everything, in lieu of the friendly hospitalities drunken Silenus, his companion, found at his hands when he strayed from him, bad him but go wash himself in the river Pactolus, that is, go wash it down soundly with flowing cups of wine, and he should be as well as ever he was. By the turning of the river Pactolus into gold, after he had rinsed and clarified himself in it (which is the close of the fiction) is signified that, in regard of that blessed operation of the juice of the grape in him, from that
day forth in nothing but golden cups he would drink or quaff it, whereas in wooden mazers
³³⁸
and Agathocles'
³³⁹
earthen stuff they trillild it off before, and that was the first time that any golden cups were used.

Follow this tract in expounding the tale of Dionysius
³⁴⁰
and Jupiter, and you cannot go amiss. No such Jupiter, no such golden-coated image was there; but it was a plain golden-coated herring, without welt or gard, whom, for the strangeness of it, they (having never beheld a beast of that hue before) in their temples enshrined for a God, and insomuch as Jupiter had shown them such slippery pranks more than once or twice, in shifting himself into sundry shapes, and raining himself down in gold into a woman's lap, they thought this too might be a trick of youth in him, to alter himself into the form of this golden Scaliger
³⁴¹
or red herring. And therefore, as to Jupiter, they fell down on their marybones,
³⁴²
and lift up their hay-cromes
³⁴³
unto him. Now King Dionysius being a good wise fellow, for he was afterwards a schoolmaster and had played the coachman to Plato and spit in Aristippus the philosopher's face many a time and oft, no sooner entered the temple and saw him sit under his canopy so budgely,
³⁴⁴
with a whole goldsmith's stall of jewels and rich offerings at his feet, but to him he stepped and plucked him from his state with a wennion,
³⁴⁵
then drawing out his knife most iracundiously
³⁴⁶
at one whisk lopped off his head, and stripped him out of his golden demy or mandillion,
³⁴⁷
and flayed him, and thrust him down his pudding-house
³⁴⁸
at a gob. Yet
long it prospered not with him (so revengeful a just. Jupiter is the red herring), for as he tare him from his throne, and uncased him of his habiliments, so, in small devolution of years, from his throne was he chased, and clean stripped out of his royalty, and glad to go play the schoolmaster at Corinth, and take a rod in his hand for his sceptre, and horn-book pigmies for his subjects,
id est
(as I intimated some dozen lines before) of a tyrant to become a frowning pedant or schoolmaster.

Many of you have read these stories, and could never pick out any such English. No more would you of the Ismael Persians' Haly, or Mortus Ali,
³⁴⁹
they worship, whose true etimology is,
mortuum halec
, a dead red herring and no other, though by corruption of speech they false dialect and miss-sound it. Let any Persian oppugn
³⁵⁰
this, and, in spite of his hairy tuft or love-lock he leaves on the top of his crown, to be pulled up or pulleyed up to heaven by, I'll set my foot to his and fight it out with him, that their fopperly
³⁵¹
god is not so good as a red herring. To recount
ab ovo
,
³⁵²
or from the church-book
³⁵³
of his birth how the herring first came to be a fish, and then how he came to be King of Fishes and gradationately how from white to red he changed, would require as massy a tome as Holinshed.
³⁵⁴
But in half a pennyworth of paper I will epitomize them. Let me see, hath anybody in Yarmouth heard of Leander and Hero, of whom divine Musaeus sung, and a diviner muse than him, Kit Marlowe?
³⁵⁵

Two faithful lovers they were, as every apprentice in Paul's churchyard
³⁵⁶
will tell you for your love, and sell you for your money. The one dwelt at Abidos in Asia, which was
Leander; the other, which was Hero, his mistress or Delia, at Sestos in Europe, and she was a pretty pinkany
³⁵⁷
and Venus' priest. And but an arm of the sea divided them; it divided them and it divided them not, for over that arm of the sea could be made a long arm. In their parents the most division rested, and their towns, like Yarmouth and Leystoffe, were still at wrig-wrag, and sucked from their mothers' teats serpentine hatred one against each other. Which drove Leander when he durst not deal above-board, or be seen aboard any ship, to sail to his lady dear, to play the didopper
³⁵⁸
and ducking water-spaniel
³⁵⁹
to swim to her, nor that in the day but by owl-light.

What will not blind night do for blind Cupid? And what will not blind Cupid do in the night, which is his blind-man's holiday?
³⁶⁰
By the sea on the other side stood Hero's tower, such another tower as one of our Irish castles, that is not so wide as a belfry and a cobbler cannot jert
³⁶¹
out his elbows in: a cage or pigeonhouse, romthsome
³⁶²
enough to comprehend her and the toothless trot
³⁶³
her nurse who was her only chatmate and chambermaid, consultively
³⁶⁴
by her parents being so encloistered from resort that she might live chaste vestal priest to Venus, the Queen of Unchastity. She would none of that, she thanked them, for she was better provided, and that which they thought served their turn best of sequestering her from company, served her turn best to embrace the company she desired. Fate is a spaniel that you cannot beat from you; the more you think to cross it, the more you bless it and further it.