The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (56 page)

Say that a more piercing linceus'
⁴⁸⁹
sight should dive into the entrails of this insinuating parasite's knavery. To the strappado and the stretching torture he will refer it for trial, and there either tear him limb from limb, but he will extract some capital confession from him that shall concern the Prince's life and his crown and dignity, and bring himself in such necessary request about his Prince as he may hold for his right hand and the only staff of his royalty, and think he were undone if he were without him, when the poor fellow so tyrannously handled would rather in that extremity of convulsion confess he crucified Jesus Christ than abide it any longer. I am not against it, for God forbid I should, that it behooves all loyal true subjects to be vigilant and jealous for their prince's safety, and, certain, too jealous
and vigilant of it they cannot be if they be good princes that reign over them, nor use too many means of disquisition by tortures or otherwise to discover treasons pretended against them; but upon the least wagging of a straw to put them in fear where no fear is, and make a hurly-burly in the realm upon ‘had I wist', not so much for any zeal or love to their princes, or tender care of their preservation, as to pick thanks and curry a little favour that thereby they may lay the foundation to build a suit on or cross some great enemy they have, I will maintain it is most lewd and detestable. I accuse none, but such there have been belonging to princes in former ages, if there be not at this hour.

Stay, let me look about. Where am I? In my text, or out of it? Not out, for a groat;
⁴⁹⁰
out, for an angel.
⁴⁹¹
Nay, I'll lay no wagers, for now I perponder more sadly
⁴⁹²
upon it, I think I am out indeed. Bear with it, it was a pretty parenthesis of princes and their parasites, which shall do you no harm, for I will cloy you with herring before we part.

Will you have the other riddle of the cropshin to make up the pair that I promised you? You shall, you shall (not have it, I mean) but bear with me, for I cannot spare it, and I persuade myself you will be well contented to spare it except it were better than the former. And yet I pray you what fault can you find with the former? Hath it any more sense in it than it should have? Is it not right of the merry cobbler's cut in that witty play of
The Case is Altered
?
⁴⁹³

I will speak a proud word, though it may be counted arrogancy in me to praise mine own stuff. If it be not more absurd than
Philips, his Venus
,
⁴⁹⁴
The White Tragedy
or
The Green Knight
, or I can tell what English to make of it in part or in whole, I wish, in the foulest weather that is,
to go in cut Spanish leather shoes or silk stockings or to stand barehead to a nobleman and not get of him the price of a periwig to cover my bare crown, no, not so much as a pipe of tobacco to raise my spirits and warm my brain.

My readers peradventure may see more into it than I can. For in comparison of them, in whatsoever I set forth, I am
Bernardus non vidit omnia
,
⁴⁹⁵
as blind as blind Bayard,
⁴⁹⁶
and have the eyes of a beetle. Nothing from them is obscure, they being quicker sighted than the sun to spy in his beams the motes that are not, and able to transform the lightest murmuring gnat to an elephant. Carp or descant they as their spleen moves them, my spleen moves me not to file my hands with them, but to fall a crash
⁴⁹⁷
more to the red herring.

How many be there in the world that childishly deprave
⁴⁹⁸
alchemy, and cannot spell the first letter of it! In the black book of which ignorant band of scorners it may be I am scorned up with the highest. If I be, I must entreat them to wipe me out, for the red herring hath lately been my ghostly father to convert me to their faith; the
probatum est
⁴⁹⁹
of whose transfiguration
ex Luna in Solem
,
⁵⁰⁰
from his dusky tin hue into a perfect golden blandishment, only by the foggy smoke of the grossest kind of fire that is, illumines my speculative soul, what much more, not sophisticate or superficial effects, but absolute essential alterations of metals, there may be made by an artificial repurified flame and diverse other helps of nature added besides.

Cornelius Agrippa maketh mention of some philosophers that held the skin of the sheep that bare the golden fleece to be nothing but a book of alchemy written upon it. So if
we should examine matters to the proof, we should find the red herring's skin to be little less. The accidens of alchemy I will swear it is, be it but for that experiment of his smoking alone, and, which is a secret that all tapsters will curse me for blabbing, in his skin there is plain witchcraft. For do but rub a can or quart pot round about the mouth with it, let the cunningest lickspigot swelt his heart out, the beer shall never foam or froth in the cup, whereby to deceive men of their measure, but be as settled as if it stood all night.

Next, to draw on hounds to a scent, to a red herring skin there is nothing comparable. The round or cob
⁵⁰¹
of it dried and beaten to powder is
ipse ille
⁵⁰²
against the stone; and of the whole body of itself, the finest ladies beyond seas frame their kickshaws.
⁵⁰³

The rebel Jack Cade was the first that devised to put red herrings in cades,
⁵⁰⁴
and from him they have their name. Now as we call it the swinging of herrings when we cade them, so in a halter was he swung and trussed up as hard and round as any cade of herring he trussed up in his time, and perhaps of his being so swung and trussed up, having first found out the trick to cade herring, they would so much honour him in his death as not only to call it swinging, but cading of herring also. If the text will bear this, we will force it to bear more, but it shall be but the weight of a straw, or the weight of Jack. Straw
⁵⁰⁵
more; who, with the same
Graeca fide
⁵⁰⁶
I marted unto you the former, was the first that put the red herring in straw over head and ears like beggars, and the fishermen upon that jack-strawed him ever after. And some, for he was so beggarly a knave that challenged to be a gentleman, and had no wit nor wealth but what he got by the warm wrapping up of herring,
raised this proverb of him: ‘Gentleman Jack Herring,
⁵⁰⁷
that puts his breeches on his head for want of wearing'. Other disgraceful proverbs of the herring there be, as ‘Ne'er a barrel better herring, neither flesh nor fish, nor good red herring', which those that have bitten with ill bargains of either sort have dribbed forth
⁵⁰⁸
in revenge, and yet not have them from Yarmouth; many coast towns besides it enterprising to curry, salt and pickle up herrings, but mar them because they want the right feat how to salt and season them. So I could pluck a crow
⁵⁰⁹
with poet Martial for calling it
putre halec
, ‘the scald
⁵¹⁰
rotten herring', but he meant that of the fat reasty
⁵¹¹
Scottish herrings, which will endure no salt, and in one month (bestow what cost on them you will) wax rammish
⁵¹²
if they be kept, whereas our embarrelled white herrings, flourishing with the stately brand of Yarmouth upon them,
scilicet
⁵¹³
the three half-lions and the three half-fishes with the crown over the head, last in long voyages, better than the red herring, and not only are famous at Roan, Paris, Diepe, Cane (whereof the first, which is Roan, serveth all the high countries of France with it, and Diepe, which is the last save one, victuals all Picardy with it), but here at home is made account of like a marquis and received at Court right solemnly. I care not much if I rehearse to you the manner, and that is thus.

Every year about Lent tide, the sheriffs of Norwich bake certain herring pies (four-and-twenty, as I take it) and send them as a homage to the Lord of Caster hard by there, for lands that they hold of him; who presently upon the like tenure, in bouncing hampers, covered over with his cloth of arms, sees them conveyed to the Court in the best equipage. At Court when they arrived, his man rudely enters not
at first but knocketh very civilly, and then officers come and fetch him with torchlight, where having disfraughted and unloaded his luggage, to supper he sets him down like a lord, with his wax lights before him, and hath his mess of meat allowed him with the largest, and his horses (
quatenus
horses
⁵¹⁴
) are provendered as epicurely. After this, some four mark fee towards his charges is tendered him, and he jogs home again merrily.

A white pickled herring? Why, it is meat for a prince. Haunce Vandervecke
⁵¹⁵
of Rotterdam, as a Dutch post informed me) in bare pickled herring laid out twenty thousand pound the last fishing. He had lost his drinking belike, and thought to store himself of medicines enough to recover it.

Noble Caesarian Charlemagne herring, Pliny and Gesner
⁵¹⁶
were to blame they slubbered thee over so negligently. I do not see why any man should envy thee, since thou art none of these lurcones or epulones,
⁵¹⁷
gluttons or fleshpots of Egypt (as one that writes of the Christians' captivity under the Turk enstyleth us English men), nor livest thou by the unliving or eviscerating of others, as most fishes do, or by any extraordinary filth whatsoever, but, as the chameleon liveth by the air and the salamander by the fire, so only by the water art thou nourished and nought else, and must swim as well dead as live.

Be of good cheer, my weary readers, for I have espied land, as Diogenes
⁵¹⁸
said to his weary scholars when he had read to a waste leaf. Fishermen, I hope, will not find fault with me for fishing before the net, or making all fish that comes to the net in this history, since, as the Athenians bragged they were the first that invented wrastling, and one Ericthonius amongst them that he was the first that
joined horses in collar couples for drawing, so I am the first that ever set quill to paper in praise of any fish or fishermen.

Not one of the poets aforetime could give you or the sea a good word. Ovid saith
Nimium ne credite ponto
: the sea is a slippery companion, take heed how you trust him, and further
Periurii poenas repetit ille locus
: it is a place like hell, good for nothing but to punish perjurers. With innumerable invectives more against it throughout in every book.

Plautus in his
Rudens
bringeth in fishermen cowthring
⁵¹⁹
and quaking, dung-wet after a storm, and complaining their miserable case in this form:
Captamus cibutn e mari; si eventus non venit, neque quicquam captum est pisctum, salsi lautique domum redimus clanculum, dormimus incoenati
(‘All the meat that we eat we catch out of the sea, and if there we miss, well washed and salted, we sneak home to bed supperless'). And upon the tail of it he brings in a parasite that flouteth and bourdeth
⁵²⁰
them thus:
Heus vos familica gens hominum ut vivitis? ut peritis?
: hough, you hunger-starved gubbins or offals of men, how thrive you, how perish you? And they, cringing in their necks, like rats smothered in the hold, poorly replicated
Vivimus fame, speque, sitique
, with hunger and hope and thirst we content ourselves. If you would not misconceit that I studiously intended your defamation, you should have thick hailshot of these.

Not the lousy riddle
⁵²¹
wherewith fishermen constrained, some say. Homer, some say another philosopher, to drown himself because he could not expound it, but should be dressed and set before you
supernagulum
,
⁵²²
with eight-score more galliard cross-points
⁵²³
and kickshiwinshes
⁵²⁴
of giddy earwig brains, were it not I thought you too fretful and choleric with feeding altogether on salt meats to have
the secrets of your trade in public displayed. Will this appease you, that you are the predecessors of the Apostles, who were poorer fishermen than you, that for your seeing wonders in the deep, you may be the sons and heirs of the prophet Jonas, that you are all cavaliers and gentlemen since the King of Fishes vouchsafed you for his subjects, that for your selling smoke
⁵²⁵
you may be courtiers, for your keeping of fasting-days Friar Observants, and lastly, that, look in what town there is the sign of The Three Mariners, the huffcapest
⁵²⁶
drink in that house you shall be sure of always?

No more can I do for you than I have done, were you my god-children every one. God make you his children and keep you from the Dunkirks,
⁵²⁷
and then I doubt not but when you are driven into harbour by fould weather, the cans shall walk to the health of
Nashe's Lenten Stuff
and the praise of the red herring, and even those that attend upon the pitch-kettle
⁵²⁸
will be drunk to my good fortunes and recommendations. One boon you must not refuse me in, if you be
boni socii
⁵²⁹
and sweet Olivers,
⁵³⁰
that you let not your rusty swords sleep in their scabbards, but lash them out in my quarrel as hotly as if you were to cut cables or hew the main mast overboard, when you hear me mangled and torn in men's mouths about this playing with a shuttlecock or tossing empty bladders in the air.

Alas, poor hungerstarved muse, we shall have some spawn of a goose-quill or over-worn pander quirking and girding,
⁵³¹
was it so hard-driven that it had nothing to feed upon but a red herring? Another drudge of the pudding-house
⁵³²
(all
whose lawful means to live by throughout the whole year will scarce purchase him a red herring) says I might as well have writ of a dog's turd (in his teeth surreverence
⁵³³
). But let none of these scum of the suburbs be too vinegar-tart with me; for if they be, I'll take mine oath upon a red herring and eat it to prove that their fathers, their grandfathers, and their great-grandfathers, or any other of their kin were scullion's dishwash and dirty draff and swill, set against a red herring. The puissant red herring, the golden Hesperides red herring, the Meonian
⁵³⁴
red herring, the red herring of Red Herrings' Hall, every pregnant peculiar of whose resplendent laud and honour to delineate and adumbrate to the ample life were a work that would drink dry fourscore and eighteen Castalian fountains of eloquence, consume another Athens of fecundity, and abate the haughtiest poetical fury twixt this and the burning zone and the tropic of Cancer. My conceit is cast into a sweating sickness, with ascending these few steps of his renown. Into what a hot broiling Saint Lawrence fever
⁵³⁵
would it relapse then, should I spend the whole bag of my wind in climbing up to the lofty mountain-crest of his trophies? But no more wind will I spend on it but this: Saint Denis