NASHES Lenten stuff, Containing, The Description and first Procreation and Increase of the town of Great Yarmouth in norfolk:  
With a new Play never played before, of the praise of the read HERRING.  
fit of all clerk of Noblemens kitchens to be red: and not unnecessary by all serving men that haue short boord-wages, to be remembered.  
Famam peto per vndas.  
LONDON Printed for N. L. and C. B. and are to be sold at the west end of Paules. 1599.   

To his worthy good patron, lusty humphrey, according as the townsmen do christen him, little Numps as the nobility and Courtiers do name him, and Honest humphrey, as all his friends and acquaintance esteem him, King of the Tobacconists hic& ubique, and a singular maecenas to the Pipe and the tabor( as his patient livery attendant can witness) his bound Orator T. N. most prostrately offers up this tribute of ink and paper.  
MOst courteous unlearned lover of Poetry, and yet a Poet thyself, of no less price then H. S. that in honour of Maid-marrian gives sweet Margerā for his Empresse, and puts the sow most saucily upon some great parsonage, what ever she bee, bidding her( as it runs in the old song) Go from my Garden go, for there no flowers for thee doth grow. These be to notify to your diminutive excelsitude, and compendiate greatness, what my zeal is towards you, that in no straighter bonds would bee pounded and enlisted, then in an Epistle dedicatory. Too many more lusty blood Brauamente segniors, with Cales beards, as broad as scuilers maples, that they make clean their boats with, could I haue turned it over, and had nothing for my labour, some faire words except, of, good sir will it please you to come near, and drink a cup of wine? after my return from Ireland I doubt not but my fortunes will be of some growth to requited you. In the mean time my sword is at your command; and before God, money so scatteringly runs here and there upon vtensilia, furnitures, ancients, and other necessary preparations,( and which is a double charge, look how much Tobacco wee carry with us to expel could, the like quantity of Staues-aker wee must provide us of to kill lice in that rugged country of rebels) that I say unto you in the word of a martialist, wee cannot do as wee would. I am no incredulous Didimus, but haue more faith to beleeue they haue no coin, then they haue means to supply themselves with it and so leave them. To any other carpelmunger or primrose knight of Primero, bring I a dedication and the dice over night haue not befriended him he sleeps five dayes and five nights to new skin his beauty, and will not bee known he is awaked till his men upon their own bonds( a dismal world for trenchermen, when their maisters bond shal not be so good as theirs) haue took up commodities or fresh droppings of the mint for him: and then; what then? he pays for the ten dozen of balls he left upon the score at the tennis court, he sends for his Barber to depure, decurtate, and punge him, whom having not paid a twelmonth before, he now rains down eight quarter angels into his hand, to make his liberality seem greater, and gives him a cast riding jerkin, and an old Spanish hat into the bargain, and Gods peace bee with him. The chambor is not rid of the smell of his feet, but the greasy shoemaker with his squirrels skin, and a whole stall of ware upon his arm enters, and wrencheth his legs for an hour together, and after shows histally. By S. Loy that draws deep, and by that time his Tobacco merchant is made even with, and he hath dinde at a tavern, and slept his vnder-meale at a bawdy house, his purse is on the heild and only forty shillings he hath behind, to try his fortune with at the cards in the presence, which if it prosper, the court cannot contain him, but to London again be will, to revel it and haue two plays in one night, invite all the Poets and musicians to his chamber the next morning, where against their coming, a whole heap of money shall bee bespread upon the board and all his trunks opened to show his rich suits, but the devill a whit he bestows on them, save bottle ale and Tobacco: and desires a general meeting.  
The particular of it is that bounty is bankrupt, and Lady sensuality licks all the fat from the seven Liberal Sciences, that Poetry, if it were not a trick to please, my Lady would bee excluded out of Christian burial, and in stead of wreaths of laurel to crown it with haue a bell with a cocks comb clapped on the crown of it by old johannes de Indagines, and his choir of dorbellists. Wherefore the premises considered( I pray you consider of that word premises for somewhere I haue borrowed it) neither to rich noble, right worshipful, or worshipful, of spiritual or temporal, will I consecrate this work, but to thee and thy capering humour alone, that if thy stars had done thee right, they should haue made thee one of the mightiest princes of Germany, not for thou canst drive a coach or kill an ox so well as they but that thou art never well, but when thou art amongst the retinue of the Muses, and there spendest more in the twinkling of an eye, then in a whole year thou gettest by some grasierly gentility thou followest. A King thou art by name, and a King of good fellowship by nature, whereby I ominate this Encomion of the king of fishes was predestinate to thee from thy swaddling clothes. hug it, ingle it, kiss it, and cull it now thou hast it,& renounce eating of green beef and garlic, till Martlemas, if it be not the next style to The strife of love in a dream, or, the Lamentable burning of Teuerton. give me good words I beseech thee though thou givest me nothing else, and thy words shal stand for thy deeds, which I will take as well in worth, as if they were the deeds and evidences of all the land thou hast. here I bring you a red herring, if you will find drink to it, there an end, no other detriments will I put you to. Let the Kanne of strong ale your constable, with the toaste his brown bill, and sugar and nutmegs his watchmen stand in a readiness, to entertain me every time I come by your lodging. In Ruscia there are no presents but of meate or drink; I present you with meate, and you in honourable courtesy to requited me, can do no less then present me with the best mornings draft of merry-go-downe in your quarters, and so I kiss the shadow of your feetes shadow, amiable Donsell, expecting your sacred poem of the hermits Tale, that will restore the golden age amongst us, and so upon my souls knees I take my leave.  
Yours for a whole last of red Herrings. Th. Nashe.   

To his Readers, he cares not what they be.  
NAshes Lentenstuffe: and why Nashes Lentenstuffe? some scabbed scald squire replies, because I had money lent me at Yarmouth, and I pay them again in praise of their town and the red herring, and if it were so goodman Pig-wiggen, were not that honest dealing, pay thou al thy debts so if thou canst for thy life, but thou art a Ninnihammer: that is not it, therefore Nickneacaue I call it Nashes Lenten-stuffe, as well for it was most of my study the last Lent, as that we use so to term any fish that takes salt, of which the read Herring is one the aptest. O but saith another John Dringle, there is a book o● the read Herrings tail printed four terms since that made this stale. Let it be a tail of habberdine if it will, I am nothing entailed thereunto, I scorn it. I scorn it, that my works should turn tail to any man. Head, body, tail and all of a red Herring you shall haue of me, if that will please you or if that will not please you, stay till easter term and then with the answer to the Trim Tram, I will make you laugh your hearts out. Take me at my word, for I am the man that will do it. This is a light friskin of my wit, like the praise of injustice, the fever rain, Busiris or Phalaris, wherein I follow the trace of the famousest schollers of all ages, whom a wantonizing humour once in their life time hath possessed to play with straws, and turn molehills into mountaines.  
every man can say Bee to a Battledore, and writ in praise of virtue, and the seven liberal Sciences, thrash corn out of the full sheaves, and fetch water out of the Thames; but out of dry stubble to make an after harvest, and a plentiful crop without sowing, and wring juice out of a flint, thats Pierce a Gods name, and the right trick of a workman. Let me speak to you about my huge words which I use in this book, and then you are your own men to do what you list. Know it is my true vain to be tragicus Orator, and of all stiles I most affect& strive to imitate Aretines, not caring for this demure soft mediocre genus, that is, like water and wine mixed together, but give me pure wine of itself,& that begets good blood, and heats the brain thoroughly: I had as lieue haue no sun, as haue it shine faintly, no fire, as a smothering fire of small coals, no clothes, rather then wear linsey wolsey. Apply it for me, for I am called away to correct the faults of the press, that escaped in my absence from the Printing-house.   

THE PRAISE OF the read herring.  
THe strange turning of the Ile of Dogs, from a commedie to a tragedy two summers past, with the troublesone stir which happened about it, is a general rumour that hath filled all England, and such a heavy cross laid vpon me, as had well near confounded me: I mean, not so much in that it sequestered me from the wonted means of my maintenance, which is as great a maim to any mans happiness, as can bee feared from the hands of misery, or the deep pit of despair whereinto I was fallen, beyond my greatest friends reach to recover me: but that in my exile and irksome discontented abandonment, the silliest millers thumb, or contemptible stickle-banck of my enemies, is as busy nibbling about my famed, as if I were a deade man thrown amongst them to feed vpon. So I am I confess in the worlds outward apparance, though perhaps I may prove a cunninger diver then they are ware, which if it so happen as I am partly assured, and that I plunge above water once again, let them look to it, for I will put them in brine, 
Quassa tamen nostra est, non mersa nec obrutunauis.  or a piteous pickle every one. But let that pass, though they shal find I will not let it pass when time serves, I having a pamphlet hot a brooding that shall be called the Barbers warming pan, and to the occasion, a fresh of my falling in alliance with this lenten argument. That infortunate imperfect equivocation of my idle houres the Ile of Dogs before mentioned, breeding unto me such bitter throws in the teaming as it did, and the tempests that arose at his birth, so astonishing outrageous and violent as if my brain had been conceived of another Hercules, I was so terrified with my own increase( like a woman long travailing to bee delivered of a monster) that it was no sooner born but I was glad to run from it. Too inconsiderate he adlong rashness this may be censured in me, in being thus prodigal in aduantaging my aduersaries, but my case is no smoothred secret, and with light cost of rough cast rethorieke it may be tollerablely playstered over, if under the pardon and privilege of incensed higher powers it were lawfully indulgenst me freely to advocate my own astrology. Sufficeth what they in their grave wisedoomes shall proscribe, I in no sort will seek to acquit, nor presumptuously attempt to dispute against the equity of their judgements, but humble and prostrate appeal to their mercies. avoid or give ground I did, scriptum est I will not go from it, and post varios casus, variable Knight arrant adventures, and outroades, and inroads, at great Yarmouth in norfolk, I arrived in the latter end of autumn. Where having scarce looked about me, my presaging mind said to itself, Hic fanonius serenus est, hic auster imbricus, this is a predestinate fit place for Pierse Pennilesse to set up his staff in. Therein not much diameter to my deuining hopes did the event sort itself, for six weekes first and last under that predodumant constellation of Aquarius or Ioues Nectar filler, took I up my repose, and there met with such kind entertainment and benign hospitality when I was Una litera plusquam 
An imperfect equivocation I ma well call it, for I having begun but the induction and first act of it, the other sour acts without my consent, or the least guess of my drift or scope, by the players were supplied, which bread both their trouble and mine to.  
Medicus.  medicus as Plautus saith, and not able to line to myself with my own juice, as some of the crumbs of it like the crumbs in a bushy beard after a great banquet, will remain in my papers to bee seen when I am deade and under ground; from the bare perusing of which infinite posterities of hungry Poets shall receive good refreshing, even as Homer by Galataeon was pictured vomiting in a basō( in the temple that ptolemy Philopater erected to him) and the rest of the succeeding Poets after him, greedily lapping up what he disgorged. That good old blind bibber of Helicon I wot well, came a begging to one of the chief cities of Greece,& promised them vast corpulent volumes of immortality, if they would bestow vpon him but a slender outbrothers annuity of muttō& broth, and a pallet to sleep on, and with derision they rejected him, whereupon he went to their enemies with the like profier, who used him honourably, and whom he used so honourably, that to this day though it be three thousand ye are since, their name and glory flourish green in mens memory through his industry. I trust you make no question but those dull pated pennifathers, that in such dudgen scorn rejected him, drunk deep of the sour cup of repentance for it, when the high flight of his lines in common brute was ooyessed. Yea in the word of one no more wealthy then he was, wealthy said I, nay I'll befworne he was a grande jury man in respect of me, those graybeard Huddle-duddles and crusty cum-twangs, were strooke with such stinging remorse of their miserable Euclionisme and sundgery, that he was not yet could in his grave but they challenged him to be born amongst them, and they and six cities more, entred a sharp war about it, every one of them laying claim to him as their own, and to this effect hath Bucchanan an Epigram.  
Urbes certarunt septem de patria Homeri,  
Nulla domus vivo patria nulla fuit.  
seven cities stroaue whence Homer first should come  
When living, he no country had nor home.  
I allege this tale to show howe much better my lack then Homers( though all the King of Spaines Indies will not create me such a nigling Hexameter-founder as he was) in the first proclaiming of my banke-rout indigence and beggary, to bend my course to such a courteous compassionate climb as Yarmouth, and to warn others that advance their heads above all others, and haue not respected, but rather flatly opposed themselves against the friar medicants of our profession, what their amercements and vnrepriueable pennance will be, except they tear ope their oystermouthd pouches quickly, and make double amendes for their parsimony. I am no Tiresias or Calchas to prophecy, but yet I cannot tell, there may bee more resounding bel-mettall in my pen then I am ware, and if there bee, the first peal of it is Yarmouthes. For a pattern or tiny-sample what my elaborate performance would bee in this ease, had I a ful-sayld gale of prosperity to encourage me, whereas at the dishumored composing hereof may justly complain with ovid.  Anchora iam nostram non tenet vlla ratem. 
My state is so tost and weather-beaten that it hath now no anchor-holde left to cleave unto. I care not, if in a dim far of launce-skippe, I take the pains to describe this superimente principal Metropolis of the red Fish. A town it is that in rich situation exceedeth many cities, and without the which, Caput gentis, the swelling Battlementes of Gurguntus, a head city of norfolk, and suffolk, would scarce retain the name of a city, but become as ruinous and desolate as Thetforde or Ely: out of an hill or heap of sand, reared and enforced from the sea most miraculously, and by the singular policy and uncessant inestimable expense of the inhabitants, so firmly piled and rampierd against the funish waves battery, or suyng the least action of recovery, that it is more conjectural of the twain, the land with a writ of a Eiectione firma will get the vpperhande of the Ocean, then the Ocean one crows skip prevail against the Continent. Forth of the sands thus struglingly as it exalteth and liftes up his glittering head. So of the neyboring sands no less semblably( whether in recordation of their worn out affinity or no, I know not) it is so inamorately protected and patronized, that they stand as a trench or guard about it in the night, to keep off their enemies. Now in that drowsy empire of the pale-fac't queen of shades, malgre letting drive vpon their Barricadoes, or impetuously contending to break through their chain or bar, but they entomb and balist with sudden destruction. In this transcursiue reportory without some observant glance, I may not dully overpass the gallant beauty of their haven, which having but as it were a welte of land, or as M. cambden calls it, lingulam terrae, a little tongue of the earth betwixt it and the wide main, sticks not to manage arms, and hold his own vndefeasably against that universal unbounded empery of surges, and so hath done for this hundreth year. Two mile in length it stretched his winding current, and then meets with a spacious river or backwater that feeds it. A narrow channel or Isthmus in rash view you would opinionate it: when this I can devoutly aver, I beholding it with both my eyes this last fishing, six hundreth reasonable barks and vessels of good burden( with a vantage) it hath given shelter to at once in her harbour, and most of them riding abrest before the Key betwixt the Bridge and the Southgate. Many bows length beyond the mark, my pen roues not I am certain, if I do, they stand at my elbow that can correct me. The delectablest lusty sight and mouingest object, me thought it was that our Ile sets forth, and nothng behind in number with the invincible Spanish Armada, though they were not such Gargantuan boisterous gulliguts as they, though ships and galeasses they would haue been reckoned in the navy of K. Edgar, who is chronicled& registered with three thousand ships of war to haue scoured the narrow seas, and sailed round about England every Summer. That which especiallest nourished the most prime pleasure in me, was after a storm when they were driven in swarms, and lay close pestered together as thick as they could pack; the next day following, if it were faire, they would cloud the whole sky with canvas, by spreading their drabled sails in the full clue abroad a drying, and make a braver show with them, then so many banners and streamers displayed against the sun on a mountain top. But how Yarmouth of itself so innumerable populous and replenished, and in so barren a plot seated, should not onely supply her inhabitants with plentiful purveyance of sustenance, but provant and victual moreover this monstrous army of strangers, was a matter that egregiously bepuzled and entranced my apprehension. Hollanders, Zelanders, Scots, French, western men, northern men, besides all the hundreds and wapentakes nine miles compass, fetch the best of their viands and mangery from her market. For ten weeks together this rabble rout of outlandishers are billeted with her, yet in all that while the rate of no kind of food is raised, nor the plenty of their markets one pint of butter rebated, and at the ten weekes end, when the camp is broken up, no impression of any dearth left, but rather more store then before. Some of the town dwellers haue so large an opinion of their settled provision, that if all her majesties fleet at once should put into their bay, within twelve dayes warning with so much double beer, beef, fish and biscuit they would bulk them as they could wallow away with.  
Here I could break out into a boundless race of oratory, in shrill trumpetting and concelebrating the royal magnificence of her government, that for state and strict civil ordering, scant admitteth any riuals: but I fear it would be a theme displeasant to the grave modesty of the discreet present magistrates; and therefore consultiuely I overslip it, howsoever I purpose not in the like nice respect to leap over the laudable pedigree of Yarmouth, but will fetch her from her swaddling clouts or infancy,& reveal to you when and by whom she was first raught out of the oceans arms, and start up and aspired to such starry sublimity, as also acquaint you with the notable immunities, franchises, privileges she is endowed with beyond all het confiners, by the discentine line of kings from the conquest.  
There be of you it may be, that will account me a paltrer, for hanging out the sign of the red Herring in my title page., and no such feast towards for ought you can see. Soft and faire my marsters, you must walk and talk before dinner an hour or two, the better to whet your appetites to taste of such a dainty dish as the red Herring, and that you may not think the time tedious, I care not if I bear you company, and lead you a sound walk round about Yarmouth, and show you the length and breadth of it.  
The masters and batchellours commensement dinners at Cambridge and Oxford, are betwixt three and four in the afternoon,& the rest of the antecedence of the day worn out in disputations: imagine this the act or commensement of the read Herring, that proceedeth bachelor, master& doctor all at once,& therefore his disputations must be longer. But to the point, may it please the whole generation of my auditors to be advertised, how that noble earth where the town of great Yarmouth is now mounted,& where so much fish is sold, in the dayes of yore, hath been the place where you might haue catch fish,& as plain a sea within this 600. year as any boat could tumble in,& so was the whole leuill of the Marshes betwixt it and Norwich. An. Do. 1000. or thereabouts( as I haue scrapt out of worm-eaten Parchment) and in the reign of Canutus, he that dyed drunk at Lambeth or Lome-hith, somewhat before, or some what after, not a prenticeship of yeares varying: Caput extulit undis, the sands set up shop for themselves, and from that moment to this sextine century( or let me not be taken with a lie, five hundred ninety eight, that wants but a pair of yeares to make me a true man) they would no more live under the yoke of the Sea, or haue their heads washed with his bubbly spume or Barbers balderdash, but clearly quitted, disterminated and relegated themselves from his inflated Capriciousnesse of playing the dictatory over them.  
The northern wind was the clanging trumpeter, who with the terrible blast of his throat, in one yeallow heap or plump clustred or congested them together, even as the western gales in Holland right over against them, haue wrought unruly havoc, and threshed and swept the sands so before them, that they haue choked or clamd up the middle walk or door of the rhine, and made it as stable a clod-mould, or turf ground, as any hedger can drive stake in. Castter two mile distant from this new Yarmouth we entreat of, is inscribed to be that old Yarmouth, whereof there are specialities to be seen in the oldest writers, and yet some visible apparent tokens remain of a haven that ran up to it, and there had his entrance into the sea, by aged Fishermen commonly termed Grubs haven) though now it be graueld up, and the stream or tyde-gate turned another way. But this is most warrantable, the Alpha of all the Yarmouths it was,& not the Omega correspondently,& from her withered roote they branch the high ascent of their genealogy. Omnium rerum vicissitudo est, ones falling, is anothers rising, and so fell it out with that ruined Dorpe or hamlet, which after it had relapsed into the lords hands for want of reparations, and there were not men enough in it to defend the shore from invasion, one Cerdicus a Plashing Saxon, that had reueld here and there with his battleaxe, on the bordering banks of the decrepit ouerworne village now surnamed Gorlstone threw forth his anchor, and with the afsistance of his spear, in stead of a pikestaffe, leaped aground like a sturdy bruit, and his yeomen bold cast their heels in their neck, and friskt it after him, and thence sprouteth that obscene appellation of Sarding sands, with the draff of the carterly Hoblobs thereabouts, concoct or disgeast for a scripture, verity, when the right christendom of it, is Cerdicke sands, or Cerdick shore, of Cerdicus so denominated, who was the first maylord or captain of the morris dance that on those embenched shelves stamped his footing where cods& dogfish swomme not a warp of weeks forerunning)& till he had given the onset they balked thē as quicksands. By and by after his jumping upon them, the Saxons for that Garianonum, or Yarmoth that had given up the ghost, in those slymie plashie fields of Gorlstone trowled up a second Yarmouth, abutting on the West side of the shore of this great Yarmouth, that is, but feeling the air to be unwholesome and disagreeing with them, to the ouerwhart brink or verge of the flood, that writ all one style of Cerdicke sands, they dislodged with bag and baggage, and there laid the foundation of a third Yarmouth O quam nulla potest abolere vetustas, that I hope will hold up her head till doomsday. In this Yarmouth as Master cambden saith, there were twenty inhabitants, or householders, that payed scot and lot in the time of Edward the Confessor, but a Chronographycal latin table, which they haue hanging up in their Guild hall, of all their transmutations from their Cradlehoode, infringeth this a little, and flatters her, shee is a great deal younger, in a faire text hand texting unto us, how in the Scepterdome of Edward the Confessor, the sands first began to grow into sight at a low water, and more shoulder at the mouth of the river Hirus or jerus, whereupon it was dubbed Iernmouth or Yarmouth, and then there were two Channels, one on the North, another on the South, where through the fisher-men did wander and waver up to Norwitch, and diuers parts of suffolk and norfolk, all the fenny Lerna betwixt, that with Reede is so imbristled, being( as I haue forespoke or spoken to fore) Madona, Amphitritc, fluctuous demeans or fee simplo.  
From the city of Norwich on the East part, it is sixteen mile disjunct, and dislorated, and though betwixt the Sea and the salt flood it be interposed, yet in no place about it can you dig six foot deep, but you shall haue a gushing spring of fresh or sweet water for all uses, as apt and accommodate, as Saint Winifrides Well, or Towre-hill water at London, so much praised and sought after. My Tables are not yet one quarter emptied of my notes out of their Table, which because it is, as it were a Sea Rutter diligently kept amongst them from age to age, of all their ebbs and flows, and winds that blew with or against them, I tie myself to more precisely, and thus it leadeth on.  
In the time of King Herrolde and William the Conqueour, this sand of Yarmouth grew to a settled lump, and was as dry as the sands of Arabia, so that thronging theatres of people( as well Aliens as Englishmen) hiued thither about the selling of fish and Herring, from Saint Michael to Saint Martin, and there built sutlers booths and tabernacles, to canopy their heads in from the rheum of the heauens, or the clouds dissolving Cataracts. King William Rufus having got the Golden wreathe about his head, one Herbertus Bishop of the sea of Norwich, hearing of the gangs of good fellowes, that hurtled and bustled thither, as thick as it had been to the shrine of Saint Thomas a Becket, or our lady of Walsingham, builded a certain chapel there for the service of God, and salvation of souls.  
In the reign of King henry the first, King steven, King henry the second, and Richard de cord lion, the apostasy of the sands from the yalping world was so great, that they joined themselves to the main land of Eastflege, and whole tribes of males and females, trotted bargd it thither to build and inhabit, which the said kings whiles they wielded their swords temporal animaduertised of, assigned a ruler or governor over them, that was called the Kings provost, and that manner of provostship or government remained in full force and virtue all their four Throneships, Alias a hundred year, even till the inanguration of King John, in whose dayes the forewritten-of Bishop of Norwich, seeing the numbrous increase of souls of both kindes that there had framed their nests, and meant not to forsake them till the soul Bell towld them thence, pulled down his chapel, and what by himself and the devout oblations and douatines of the fishermen vpon every return with their nets full, reedifide and raised it to a Church of that magnitude, as under ministers and Cathedrals very queasy it admits any hail fellow well met, and the Church of Saint Nicholas he hallowed it, whence Yarmuoth road is nicknamed the road of Saint Nicholas. King John to comply and keep consort with his ancestors in furthring of this new waterworke, in the ninth year of the engirting his annoynted brows with the refulgent Ophir circled, and Anno 1209. set a fresh gloss upon it, of the town or free burrow of Yarmouth, and furnished it with many substantial privileges and liberties, to haue and to hold the same of him, and his race, for fifty five pound yearly. In Anno 1240. it percht up to be governed by balies, and in a narrower limmitte then the forty yeares vndermeale of the seven sleepers, it had so much towe to her distaff and was so well lined and bombasted, that in a sea battle her ships and men conflicted the cinque ports, and therein so laid about them, that they burnt, took, and spoyled the most of them, whereof such of them as were sure flights,( saving a reverence of their manhoods) ran crying and complaining to King Henry the second, who with the advice of his counsel, set a fine of a thousand pound on the Yarmouth mens heads for that offence, which fine in the tenth of his reign he dispenc't with and pardonned.  
Edward the first, and Edward the second likewise, let them lack for no privileges, changing it from a burrow to a port town, and there setting up a custom house with the appurtenances for the loading and unloading of shlps. Henry the third in the fortieth of his empery cheard up their bloods with two charters more, and in Anno 1262. and forty five of his court keeping, he permitted them to wall in their town and moat it about with a broad ditch, and to haue a prison or jail in it. In the swindge of his trident he constituted two Lord admirals over the whole navy of England, which he disposed in two partes, the one to bear sway from the thames mouth northward, called the northern navy, the other to shape his course from the thames mouth to the westward termed the western navy, and over this northern navy, for admiral commissionated one John Peerbrowne burgess of the town of Yarmouth, and over the western navy one Sir Robert Laburnus knight.  
But Peerebrowne did not only hold his office all the time of that king doing plausible service, but was again Readmirald by Edward the third and so died; in the fourteenth of whose reign he met with the french kings navy being foure-hundred sail, near to the haven of sluice, and there so sliced and slashed them& tore their planks to mammocks and their lean guts to kites meate, that their best mercy was fire& water which hath no mercy, and not a victuelar or a drumbler of them hanging in the wind aloof, but was rib-roasted or had some of his ribs crushed with their stondarting engines, no ordinance then being invented. This Edward the third of his propensiue mind towards them, united to Yarmouth Kirtley road, from it seven mile vacant, and sowing in the furrows that his predecessors had entred, hayned the price of their privileges& not brought them down one barley kernel.  
Richard the second vpon a discord twixt Leystofe and Yarmouth, after diverse law-dayes and arbitrary mandates to the counties of suffolk and norfolk directed about it, in proper person 1385. came to Yarmouth and in his parliament the year ensuing, confirmed unto it the liberties of Kirtley road,( the onely motive of all their contention). henry the fifth or the fifth of the Henries that ruled over us, abridged them not amity of their purchased prerogatives, but permitted them to build a bridge over their haven and aided and furthered them in it. Henry the sixth, Edward the fourth, Henry the seventh and King Henry the eight, with his daughters queen Mary and our Chara deum soboles queen Elizabeth, haue not withered up their hands in signing and subscribing to their requests, but our virgin rectoresse most of al, hath shoured down her bounty vpon them, granting them greater grants then ever they had, besides by-matters of the clerk of the marketshippe, and many other beneuolences towards the reparation of their port. This and every town hath his backewinters or frosts that nip it in the blade( as not the clearest sunshine but hath his shade, and there is a time of sickness as well as of health). The backewinter, the frost biting, the eclipse, or shade, and sickness of Yarmouth was, a great sickness or plague in it 1348, of which in one year seven thousand and fifty people toppled up their heels there. The new building at the west end of the Church was begun there 1330. which like the imperfect works of kings college in Cambridge, or Christ-church in Oxford haue too costly large foundations to be ever finished,  
It is thought if the town had not been so scourged and eaten up by that mortality, out of their own purses they would haue proceeded with it, but now they haue gone a nearer way to the wood, for with wooden galleries in the Church that they haue, and stayry degrees of seats in them, they make as much room to sit and hear, as a new west end would haue done.  
The length and breadth of Yarmouth I promised to show you; haue with you, haue with you: but first look wistly vpon the walls, which if you mark, make a stretched out quadrangle with the haven. They are in compass from the South chains to the North chains, two thousand one hundreth and fourscore shepherds. They haue towers vpon them sixteen: mounts vnderfonging& enflancking them two of old, now three, which haue their thundering tools to compel Deigo spaniard to duck, and strike the wind colic in his paunch, if he prance to near them, and will not vail to the queen of England. The compass about the wall of this new mount is five hundreth foot, and in the measure of yards eight score and seven. The breadth of the foundation nine foot: the depth within ground eleven. The height to the setting thereof fifteen foot, and in breadth at the setting of it, five foot three inches, and the procerous stature of it( so embailing and girdling in this mount) twenty foot and six inches. Gates to let in her friends, and shut out her enemies, Yarmouth hath ten, lanes seuenscore: as for her streets, they are as long as threescore streets in London, and yet they divide them but into three. void ground in the town from the walls to the houses, and from the houses to the haven, is not within the verge of my Geometry. The liberties of it on the fresh water one way, as namely from Yarmouth to S. Toolies in beccles water, are ten mile, and from Yarmouth to hardly cross another way, ten mile, and conclusiuely, from Yarmouth to Waybridge in the narrow North water ten mile; in all which fords or Meandors: none can attach, arrest, distress, but their officers; and if any drown themselves in them, their Crowners sit vpon them.  
I had a crotchet in my head, here to haue given the rains to my pen, and run astray throughout all the cost towns of England, digging up their dilapidations, and raking out of the dust-heape or charnel house of tenebrous eld, the rottenest relic of their monuments, and bright scoured the canker eaten brass of their first bricklayers and founders,& commented and paralogized on their condition in the present,& in the pretertense, not for any love or hatred I bear them, but that I would not be snibd, or haue it cast in my dish, that therefore I praise Yarmouth so rantantingly, because I never elsewhere baited my horse, or took my bow and arrows and went to bed. Which losing( had I been let alone) I would haue put to bed with a recumbentibus, by uttering, the best that with a safe conscience might be uttered of the best, or worst of them all, and not withstanding all at best, that tongue could speak, or hart could think of them, they should bait me an ace of Yarmouth. Mutch brainetossing and breaking of my skull it cost me, but farewell it, and farewell the bailies of the Cynqueports, whose primordiat Gethneliaca, was also dropping out of my inckhorne, with the silver oar of their barronry by William the conqueror conveyed over them at that nick when he firmed and rubrickt the Kentishmens gauill kind of the son to inherit at fifteen, and the felony of the father not to draw a foot of land from the son,& amongst the sons the portion to be equally distributed; and if there were no sons, much good do it the daughters, for they were to share it after the same tenor, and might alienate it how they would, either by legacy or bargain without the consent of the lord.  
To shun spite, I smothered these dribblements,& refrained to descant how William the conqueror having heard the proverb of Kent and christendom, thought he had won a country as good as all christendom, when he was enfeofed of Kent, for which, to make it sure unto him after he was entailed thereunto, nought they asked they needed to ask twice, it being enacted ere the words came out of their mouth. Of that profligated labour, yet my breast pants and labours: a whole moneths mind of revolving meditation, I raueling out therein( as raueling out signifies Penelopes telam retexere, the vnweauing of a web before woven and contexted:) It pities me, it pities me, that in cutting of so faire a diamond as Yarmouth, I haue not a casket dusky Coruish diamonds by me, and a box of muddy foils the better to set it forth. Ut nemo miser nisi comparatus, sic nihil pro mirifico nisi cum aliis conferatur. Cedites solistellae scintillantes, soli Garrianano cedite reliqua oppida veligera sedium naualium speciocissimo said redeo ad vernaculvm.  
All Common wealths assume their prenominations of their common divided weal, as where one man hath not too much riches, and another man too much poverty: Such was Platos community and Licurgus, and the old Romans laws, of measuring out their fields, their meads, their pastures& houses, and meating out to every one his childes portion. To this Commune bonum( or every horse his loaf) Yarmouth in propinquity is as the buckle to the thong, and the next finger to the thumb; not that it is sibbe or catercousins to any mongrel Democratia, in which one is all,& all is one, but that in her as they are not al one so one or two there pockets not up all the pieces, there being two hundreth in it worth three hundred pound a piece, with poundage and shillings to the lurtched, set a side the bailiffs four and twenty, and eight and forty. Put out mine eye, who can with such another brag of my Sea town within two hundred mile of it. But this common good within itself, is nothing to the common good it communicats to the whole state. Shall I particularise unto you, quibus vijs& modis, how and wherein. There is my hand to, I will do it, and this is my exordium. A town of defence it is to the Counties of suffolk and norfolk against the enemies,( so accounted at the first granting of there liberties) and by the natural strength of the situation so apparent, being both environed with many sands, and now of late by great charge, much more fortified then in ancient times. All the realm it profiteth many ways, as by the free Faire of herring chiefly, maintained by the fisher-men of Yarmouth themselves, by the great plenty of salted fish there, not so little two yeares past as four hundred thousand, wherein were employed about fourscore sail of barks of their own.  
By the furnishing forth of forty boats for mackerell at the spring of the year when all things are dearest, which is a great relief to all the country thereabouts, and soon after Bartlemewe-tyde, a hundred and twenty sail of their own for herrings, and forty sail of other ships and barks trading new castle, the low countries and other voyages. Norwitch at her majesties coming in progress thither, presented her with a show of knitters on a high stage placed for the nonce, Yarmouth if the like occasion were, could clap up as good a show of netbrayders, or those that haue no clothes to wrap their hides in or bread to put in their mouths, but what they earn and get by brayding of nets,( not so little as two thousand pound they yearly dispersing amongst the poor women and children of the country, for the spinning of twine to make them with, besides the labour of the enhabitauntes in working them) and for a commodious green place near the seashoare to mend and dry them, not salisbury plain or Newmarket heath( though they haue no vicinity or neighbourhoode with the sea, or scarce with any ditch or pond of freshwater) may ouerpeere or out crow her, there being above five thousand pounds worth of them at a time upon her dens a sunning. A convenient key within her haven shee hath, for the delivery of nets and herrings, where you may lye a float at a low water;( I beseech you do not so in the thames), many serviceable mariners and seafaring-men shee trayneth up( but of that in the herring.)  
The marshes and lower grounds lying vpon the three riuers that vagary up to her,( comprehending many thousand acres) by the vigilant preservation of their haven are increased in value more then half, which else would be a Maeotis palus, a meare or lake of eels frogs, and wilde-duckes. The city of Norwitch( as in the praeludium hereof I had a twitch at) fares were the worse for her, nor would fare so well if it were not for the fish of all sorts that shee cloyeth her with, and the fellowship of their haven into which their three riuers infuse themselves, and through which their goods and merchandise from beyond seas are keeled up with small cost to their very thresholds, and to many good towns on this side, and beyond. I would be loth to build a labyrinth in the gatehouse of my book, for you to loose yourselves in, and therefore I shred of many things, we will but cast over the bill of her charge, and talk a word or two of her buildings, and break up and go to breakfast with the read herring. The haven hath cost in these last 28. yeares, six and twenty thousand two hundred and six and fifty pound four shillings and five pence. Fortification and powder since Anno 1587. two thousand marks, the sea-seruice in Anno 1588. eight hundreth pounds, the portugal voyage a thousand pound, the voyage to Cales as much.  
It hath lost by the Dunkerkers a thousand pound, by the Frenchmen three thousand, by Wafting eight hundred, by the spaniards and other losses not ranted, at the least three thousand more. The continual charge of the town in maintenance of their haven, five hundred pounds a year, Omnibus annis for ever, the fee farm of the town fifty five pound, and five pound a year above for Kirtley road. The continual charge of the bridge over the haven, their walls, and a number of other odd reckonings we deal not with, towards all which they haue not in certain revenues above fifty or three-score pounds a year, and that is in houses. The yearly charge towards the provision of fish for her majesty 1000. pounds, as for arable matters of tillage and husbandry, and grazing of cattle, their barren sands will not bear them, and they get not a beggars noble by one or other of them, but their whole harvest is by Sea.  
It were to be wished that other coasters were so industrious as the Yarmouth, in winning the treasure of fish out of those profundities, and then we should haue twenty eggs a penny: and it would be as plentiful a world as when abbeys stood: and now if there be any plentiful world, it is in Yarmouth. Her sumptuous porches and garnished buildings are such, as no port town in our british circumference( nay, take some port cities overplus into the bargainer) may suitably stake with, or adequate.  
By the proportion of the East surprised Gades or Cales, diuers haue tried their cunning, to configurate a twinlike image of it, both in the correlative analagie of the spanbroad rouse running betwixt, as also of the skirt or lappet of earth whereon it stands, herein onely limiting the difference, that the houses here are not such flat custard Crownes at the top as they are. But I for my parte cast it aside as two obscure a Canton, to demonstrate and take the altitude by of so elysian a habitation as Yarmouth. Of a bounzing sidewasted parish in Lancashire, we haue a flying voice dispersed, where they go nine mile to Church every Sunday, but Parish for Parish throughout Lancashire, Cheshire, or Wingandecoy, both for numbers in gross of honest houshoulders, youthful courageous valiant spirites, and substantial grave burghers, Yarmouth shall drop vie with them to the last Edward groat they are worth. I am posting to my proposed scope, or else I could run ten quire of paper out of breath, in further traversing her rights and dignities.  
But of that fraught I must not take in two liberal, in case I want stowage for my read Herring, which I rely vpon as my wealthiest loading. Farewell flourishing Yarmouth, and be every day more flourishing then other until the latter day, whiles I haue my sense or existence, I will persist in loving thee, and so with this abrupt Post script I leave thee. I haue not trauaild far, though conferred with farthest fellow-travelers, from our own realm, I haue turned over venerable Bede, and plenteous beadrowles of friarly annals following on the back of him. Polidore virgil, Bucchanan, Camdens Brittania and most records of friends, or enemies I haue searched as concerning the later model of it, none of the inland partes thereof but I haue traded them as frequently as the middle walk in Poules, or my way to bed every night, yet for ought I haue red, heard, or seen, Yarmouth regal Yarmouth of all maritimall towns that are no more but fisher towns soly reigneth sance peer.  
Not any where is the word severer practised, the preacher reuerentlier observed and honoured, iustice sounder ministered, and a warlike people peaceablier demeanourd, betwixt this and the Grand Cathay, and the strand of Prester John.  
adieu adue, ten thousand fold delicate paramour of Neptune, the next year my standish may 'haps to address another voyage unto thee, if this haue any acceptance. Now it is high heaking time, and bee the winds never so easterly adverse and the tide fled from us, wee must violently towe and hale in our redoubtable Sophy of the floating kingdom of Pisces, whom so much as by name I should not haue acknowledged, had it not been that I mused how Yarmouth should be invested in such plenty and opulence, considering that in M. Hackluits English discoveries, I haue not come in ken of one mizzen mast of a man of war bound for the Indies or medireranean sternebearer sent from her Zenith or Meridian; mercurial breasted M. Harborne always accepted a rich spark of eternity first lighted and enkindled at Yarmouth, or there first bread and brought forth to see the light, who since in the hottest degrees of lo, hath echoing noised the name of our island and of Yarmouth so Tritonly that not an infant of the curtaild skinclipping pagans but talk of London as frequently as of their Prophets tomb at Maecha,& as much worships or maidenpeace as it were but one sun that shined over them all. Our first ambassador was he to the Behemoth of Constantinople, and as Moses was sent from the omnipotent God of heaven to persuade with Sultan pharaoh to let the children of Israell go, so from the prepotent goddesse of the earth Eliza was he sent to set free the English capriues and open unto us the passage into the red sea and Euphrates. How impetrable he was in mollyfying the 
The adamāt●… mollifide with nothing but blood.  adamantinest tyranny of mankind, and hourly crucifier of Iesus Christ crucifyde& wrooter up of Pallestine those that be scrutinus to prie into, let them revolve the Digests of our English discoveries cited up in the precedence, and be documentized most locupleatly. Of him and none but him who in valuation is worth 18. huge Argosees full of our present dated misshapen childish fellow-travelers, haue I took sent or come in the wind of, that ever Yarmoth vnshel lead or engendered to weather it on till they lost the Northstarre, or sailed just Antipodes against us, nor walking in her streets so many weekes together could I meet with any of these swaggering captaines,( captaines that wore a whole ancient in a scarf which made them go heave shouldered it was so boisterous) or huftituftie youthful ruffling comrades wearing every one three yeardes of feather in his capfor his mistris favour, such as wee stumble on at each second step at plymouth, Southampton, and Portsmouth, but an eniuersal marchantly formality, in habitte, speech, gestures, though little merchandise they beate their heads about, queen Norwitch for that going between them and home, at length( o that length of the full point spoils me, all gentle readers I beseech you pardon me). I fell a communing hereupon with a gentleman a familiar of mine,& he eftsoons defined unto me that the red herring was this old Ticklecob, or Magister fac totum, that brought in the read ruddocks and the grummell seed as thick as oatmeal, and made Yarmouth for argent to put dowue the city of Argentine. do but convert said he the slenderest twinkling reflex of your eyesight to this flinty ring that engirtes it, these towered walls, port-cullizd-gates and gorgeous architectures that condecorate and adorn it, and then perponder of the read herringes priority and preualence, who is the onely vnexhaustible mine that hath raised and begot all this, and minutely to riper maturity fosters and cherisheth it. The read herring alone it is that counteruailes the burdensome detrimentes of our haven, which every twelvemonth devours a Iustice of peace living, in wears and banks to beate off the sand and overthwart ledging and fencing it in; that defrayes all impositions and outward payments to her majesty( in which Yarmouth gives not the wall to six, though sixteen moth-eaten burgess towns that haue daubers and thatchers to their Mayors, challenge in parliament the vpper hand of it) and for the vaward or subburbes of my narration, that empals our sage senators or Ephori, in princely scarlet as pompous ostentyue as the Vinti quater or Lady Troynonant; wherefore quoth he if there be in thee any whit of that vnquē chable sacred sire of apollo( as al men repute) and that Minerua amongst the number of her heires hath addopted thee, or thou wilt commend thy muse to sempiternity, and haue images and statutes erected to her after her vnstringed silent interment and obsequies, rouse thy spirites out of this drowsy lethargy of melancholy they are drenched in, and wrest them up to the most outstretched airy strain of elocution to chant and carroll forth the Alteza an excelsitude of this monarchall fluddy Induperator.  
Very tractable to this lure I was trained, and put him not to the full anniling 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, then in the praise of the read herring, whose proper soil and nursery it is. But this I must give you to wit, how ever I haue took it vpon me, that never since I spouted ink, was I of worse aptitude to go thorough 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 famed a perpetual temple of the Pinetrees of Ida which never rot. For besides the loud bellowing prodigious flaw of indignation, stirred up against me in my absence and extermination from the vpper region of our celestial regiment, which hath dung me in a maner down to the infernal bottom of desolation, and so troubledly bemudded with grief and care every cell or organpipe of my purer intellectual faculties, that no more they consort with any ingenuous playful merriments, of my notebooks and all books else here in the country I am bereaved, whereby I might enamell 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 in stead of my learned counsel to assist me, I might 'haps marshall my terms in better array, and bestow such costly coquery on this Marine magnifico as you would prefer him before tart and galingale, which Chaucer preheminentest encomionizeth above all iunquetries or confectionaries whatsoever.  
Now you must accept of it as the place serves, and in stead of comfittes and sugar to strewe him with, take well in worth a farthing worth of flower to white him over and wamble him in, and I having no great pieces to discharge for his ben-uenue, or welcoming in, with this volley of Rhapsodies or small shot, he must rest pacified, and so Adrem, spur cut through thick and thin, and enter the triumphal chariot of the read herring.  
HOmer of rats and frogs hath heroiqut it, other oaten pipers after him in praise of the Gnat, the flay, the Hasill nut, the grasshopper, the butterfly, the Parrot, the Popiniay, Phillip sparrow, and the Cuckowe; the wantonner sort of them sing descant on their mistris glove, her ring, her fan, her looking glass, her pantofle, and on the same jury, I might impannell johannes Secundus, with his book of the two hundred kind of leises. 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 of their heavenly Panachaea their sovereign Guiacum, their glisters, their triacles, their mithridates of forty several poisons compacted, their bitter rhubarb, and torturing Stibium.  
The posterior Italian and german cornugraphers, stick not to applaud and cannonize unnatural sodomitry, the strumpet errand, the gout, the ague, the dropsy, the sciatiea, folly, drunckennesse, and slouenry. The Galli Gallinacei, or cocking French swarm every pissing while in their primer editions, Imprimedaiour duy, of the unspeakable healthful condiciblenesse of the Gomorrian great Poco, a Poco, their true countryman every inch of him, the prescript laws of Tennis or Balonne( which is most of their gentlemens chief liuelyhoodes) the commodity of hoarsenes, bleare-eyes, scabdhams, threadbare cloaks, potcht eggs, and Panados. Amongst our English harmonious calinos, one is up with the excellence of the brown bill 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 whitemeates, and justifies it under his hand to be bought& sold every where, that they exceed Nectar,& Ambrosia: a fourth comes forth with something in praise of nothing: a fift of an enflamed heal to coppersmithes hall, all to beerimes it of the diversity of read noses, and the hierarchy of the nose magnificat. A sixth, sweeps behind the door all earthly felicities, and makes Bakers maulkins of them, if they stand in competency with a strong dozen of poyntes; marry they must be poyntes of the matter, you must consider, whereof the foremost codpisse point is the cranes proverb in painted clothes fear God, and obey the king, and the rest some haue tagges, and some haue none. A seventh sets a Tobacco pipe in stead of a trumpet to his mouth, and of that divine drug proclaimeth miracles. An eygth cappers it up to the spheres in commendation of dancing. A ninth, offers sacrifice to the goddesse Cloaca, and disports himself very schollerly and wittilie about the reformation of close stools and houses of office, and spicing and embalming their rank entrails, that they stink not. A tenth, sets forth remedies of toasted turns against famine.  
To these I might wedge in Cornelius the brabantine, 
See the Epistle comemndatorie, before M. samuel Daniels translation of the Empreses of Paulus divinus.  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 garbd as the french Academy of the Cornucopia of a cow and what an advantageable creature shee is, beyond all the four footed rabblement of Herbagers and grass champers, day nor night that shee can rest for filing and tampring about it) as also a sworn brother of his that so bebangeth poor paper in laud of a bag-pudding as a swizer would not believe it. Neither of their decades are yet stamped but ear midsummer term they will be if their words bee sure payment, and then tell me if our English sconces be not right Sheffield or no.  
The application of this whole catalogue of wast authors is no more but this, Quot capita tot sententiae, so many heads so many whirlegigs, and if all these haue Terlery-ginckt it so frivolously of they reckt not what I may Cum gratia& priueligio pronounce it, that a read herring is wholsesome in a frosty morning, and rak up some few scattered syllables together in the exornation and pollishing of it. No more excursions and circumquaques but Totaliter a appositum.  
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 bee, they will answer you it is the very same which Polidore Virgill calls Verè aureum vellus, the true golden fleece of our woll and English cloth and nought else, other engrating vpland cormorants will grunt out it is Grana paradisi our grain or corn that is most sought after. The Westerners and Northerners that it is led 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 troll in the cash throughout all nations christendom there is no fellow to the read herring. The French Spanish and Italian haue wool enough of their own whereof they make cloth to serve their turn, though it be somewhat courser then 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 and other places of Germany, they haue quadruple the store that wee haue. As touching butter and cheese the Hollanders cry by your leave wee must go before you, and the Transalpiners with thier lordly Parmasin,( so name of the city of Parma in Italy where it is first clout-crushed and made) shoulder in for the vpper hand as hotly, when as of our appropriate glory of the read herring, no region twixt the poles articke and antarctic may can or will rebate from us one scruple.  
On no cost like ours is it caught in such abundance, no where dressed in his right cue but under our Horizon; hosted roasted and toasted here alone it is, and as well powdered and salted as any Duchman would desire. If you articulate with me of the gain or profit of it, without the which the new fanglest rarity, that no body can boast of but ourselves, after three dayes gazing is reuerst over to children for babies to play with, behold, it is every mans money from the King to the Courtier; every householder or goodman Baltrop, that keeps a family in pay, casts for it as one of his standing provisions. The poorer sort make it three parts of there sustenanuce, with it for his dinnier the patchedest Leather piltche laboratho may dine like a Spanish Duke, when the niggardliest mouse of beef will cost him sixpence. In the craft of catching or taking it, and smudging it merchant and chapmanable as it should be, it sets a work thousands, who live all the rest of the year gaily well, by what in some few weekes they scratch up then, and come to bear office of Questman and Scauinger in the Parish where they dwell, which they could never haue done, but would haue begged or starud with their wives and brattes, had not this captain of the squamy cattle so stood their good Lord and master: Carpenters, Shipwrights, makers of lines, roapes 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 vpon 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 recarrie it.  
In exchange of it from other Countries they return wine and Woades, for which is always paid ready gold, with salt, canvas, Vitre, and a great deal of good trash. Her majesties tributes and customs, this Semper Augustus of the Seas finnie freeholders, augmenteth& enlargeth vncountably, 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 then they bree de, and lightly not a slop of a ropehaler they sand forth to the queens ships, but he is first broken to the Sea in the Herring mans skiff or Cockboate, where having learned to brook all waters, and drink as he can out of a tarry can, and eat poor John out of swuttie platters when he may get it without butter or mustard, there is no ho with him but once hartned 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 black-amores, of five and five to a Rat in every mess, and the ship-boy to the tail, of stoping their noses when they drunk stinking water that came out of the pump of the ship, and cutting a greasy bufreierkin in tripes and broiling it for their dinners. Diuers Indian adventures haue been seasoned with direr mishaps, not having for eight dayes space the quantity of a candles-end among eight score to grease their lips with, and landing in the end to seek food, by the cannibal savages they haue been circumvented, and forced to yield their bodies to feed them.  
Our mitred Archpatriarch Leopald herring exacts no such 
That is for a man to be his own executioner, and at his Princes beck to go up to the top of the rock, and thence throw himself headlong. Fol. 63. pag. 2.  Muscouian vassailage of his liegemen, though he put them to their trumps other while, and scuppets not his beneficence into their mouths with such fresh water facility as M. Ascham in his schoolmaster would imply. His words these in his censure vpon 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 fisher men of rye, or herring men of Yarmouth, who deserve by commonmens opinion small commendation for any cunning sailing at all. Well, he was her majesties schoolmaster, and a S. Iohns 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 faire quarter with him, and expostulate the matter more tamely. Memorandum non abuno, I vary not a minnum from him, that in the captious mystery of monsieur herring low vessels will not give their heads for the washing, 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 cost he soundeth, nor one man by himself alone to do every thing, 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 beate against him, since one without five is as good as none, to govern the most egshell shallop that floateth, and spread her nets, and draw them in, As stiffly could I controuert it with him about pricking his carded so badly in scape norfolk or Sinus Yarmouthiensis and discrediting our countrymen for shore creepers, like these Colchester oystermen, or whiting-mungers and sprot-catchers. soliman Herring would you should persuade yourselves is loftier minded and keepeth more aloof then so, and those that are his followers if they will seek him where he is, more then common danger they must incur in close driving under the sands which alternately or betwixt times when he is disposed to ensconse himself are his entrenched Randevowe or castle of retiring, and otherwhile forty or threescoare leagues in the roaring territory they are glad on their wooden horses to post after him, and scour it with their ethiope pitchbordes till they be windlesse in his quest and pursuing. Returning from waiting on him, haue with you to the adriatic and abroad every where far and near to make portsale of their perfumed smoky commodities, and that toil rocked a sleep they are for Ultima Theule the northse as or iceland, and thence yerke over that worthy Pallamede don pedro de linge, and his worshipful nephew Hugo Habberdine, and a trundle-taile tike or shaugh or two, and towards michaelmas scud home to catch Herring again. This argues they should haue some experience of navigation, and are not such Halcyons to build their nests all on the shore as M. Ascam supposeth.  
rye is one of the ancient towns belonging to the cinque ports yet limpeth cinque ace behind Yarmouth, and it will sink when Yarmouth riseth, and yet if it were put in the balance against Yarmouth, it would rise when Yarmouth sinketh, and to stand threshing no longer about it, rye is Ry and no more but rye and Yarmouth wheat compared with it. Wherefore had he been a right clerk of the market, he would haue set a higher price on the one then the other, and set that one of highest price above the other.  
Those that deserve by common mens opinion small commendation for any cunning sailing at all, are not the Yarmouthers how ever there is a foul fault in the print escaped, that curstly squinteth and leereth that way, but the bonny northern cobbles of his country, with their Indian canaos or boats like great beef trayes or kneading troughs, firking as flight swift thorough the glassy fields of Thetis, as if it were the land of ye, and sliding over the boiling defert so early, and never bruise one bubble of it, as though they contended to out-strip the light-foot tripper in the Metamorphisis, who would run over the ripe-bending ears of corn, and never  shed or perish one kernel. No such yron-fisted Ciclops to hue it out of the flint, and run thorough any thing as these frost-bitten crab-tree faced lads spun out of the hards of the towe, which are Donsel herrings lackeys at Yarmouth every fishing.  
Let the carreeringest billow confess and absolve itself, before it prick up his bristles against them, for if it come vpon his dancing horse, and offer to tilt it with them, they will ask no trustier launces then their oars to beat out the brains of it, and stop his throat from belching.  
These rubs removed, on with our game as fast as wee may,& to the gain of the read herring again another crash. Item if it were not for this Huniades of the liquid element, that word Quadragesima, or Lent might be clean spung'd out of the calendar, with Rogation weeks, Saints eves, and the whole Ragmans roll of fasting dayes, and Fishmongers might keep christmas all the year, for any ouerlauish takings they should haue of clowns and clotted shoes, and the rubbish menialty their best customers, and their bloody aduerfaries the butchers would never leave cleaving it out in the whole chines, till they had got a Lord Maior of their company as well as they. Nay out of their wits they would be haunted with continual takings,& stand crosse-gag'd with knives in their mouths from one Shrofttuisday to another, and wear candles-endes in their hats at midsummer, having no time to shave their-prickes, or wash their fly blown aprons if Domingo Rufus or Sacrapant herring caused not the dice to run contrary.  
The Rhomish rotten Pithagoreans or Carthusian friers, that mumpe on nothing but fish, in what a flegmatique predicament would they be, did not this counterpoison of the spitting sickness( sixtiefolde more restorative then Bezer) patch them out and preserve them, which being double roasted and dryde as it is, not onely sucks up all rhewmatique inundations, but is a shooing-horne for a pint of wine overplus.  
The sweet smack that Yarmouth finds in it, and how it hath made it Lippitudo Atticae( as it was said of Aegina her near adjacent comfronter) the blemish and stain of all her salt-water sisters in England, and multiplide it from a moulhill of sand, to a cloude-crowned mount Teneriffe, abbreuiatly and meetely according to my old Sarum plain song I haue harpt vpon, and that, if there were no other certificat or instance of the inlinked consanguinity twixt him and Lady lucre, is Instar mill, worth a million of witnesses, to exemplify the witches of him. The Poets were trivial, that set up Helens face for such a top-gallant Summer May-pole for men to gaze at, and strouted it out so in their buskind braues of her beauty, whereof the onely Circes Heypasse, and repass was that it drew a thousand ships to Troy, to fetch her back with a pestilence. Wise men in Greece in the mean while to swagger so about a whore.  
Eloquious hoary beard father Nestor, you were one of them, and you M. ulysses the prudent dwarf of Pallas another, of whom it is Illiadizd that your very nose dropped sugar candy, and that your spittle was honey. Natalis Comes if he were above ground, 
●… old time ●… ey used to ●… king out at a●… miracle.  would be sworn vpon it. As loud a ringing miracle as the attractive melting eye of that strumpet can we supply thē with of our dappert piedmont Huldrick Herring, which draweth more barks to Yarmouth bay, then her beauty did to Troy. O he is attended vpon most Babilonically, and Xerxes so ouercloyd not the Hellespont with his foystes, gallies, and brigandines, as he mantleth the narrow seas with his retinue, being not much behind in the checkroule of his Ianissaries and contributories, with Eagle-soaring bullingbrook, that at his removing of household into banishment( as father Froysard threapes us down) was accompanied with 40000, men women and children weeping, from London to the lands end at dover. A colony of critical Zenos should they sinnow their sillogisticall cluster-fistes in one bundle to confute and disprove moving, were they but during the time they might lap up a mess of buttred fish, in Yarmouth one fishing, such a violent motion of toiling Mir midons they should be spectators of and a confused stirring to and fro, 
●… he sea bat●… isle at Lepan●… fought in ●… e beginning ●… f her Maie●… ies reign.  of a Lapantalike host of vnfatigable flood bickerers and foame-curbers, that they would not move or stir one foot till they had disclaimd and abiurd their bedred spittle-positions. In verament and sincerity I never crowded through this confluent herring faire, but it put me in memory of the great year of jubilee in Edward the thirds time, in which it is sealed and delivered under the hands of a public notary, three hundred thousand people romed to Rome for purgatory pills and paternal venial benedictions, and the ways beyond sea were so bungd up with your daily orators or Beads-men and your crutchet or croutchant friers or crossecreepers and barefoot penitentiaries, that a snail could not wriggle in her horns betwixt them. Small things we may express by great, and great by small, though the greatness of the red herring be not small as small a hop on my thumb as he seemeth) It is with him as with great personages, which from their high estate and not their high statures propagate the eleuaute titles of their Gogmagognes, Cast his state who will and they shall find it to be very high coloured( as high coloured as his complexion if I said there were not a pimple to be abated) In Yarmouth he hath set up his state house, where one quarter of a year he keeps open court for Iewes and gentiles.  
To fetch him in, in 
The fattall wooden horse at Troy fetched in with such pomp.  trojan Equipage some of every of the Christ-crosse Alphabet of outlandish Cosmopoli furrow up the rugged brine, and sweep through his tumultuous oous will or nill he rather then in tendering their allegiance they should be benighted with tardity. For our English Mikrokosmos or Phenician Didos hid of ground; no shire, county count palatine, or quarter of it, but rigs out some oaken squadron or other to waft him along 
The solemn bringing of the champions at Olimpus. 1. Tugging forth by the strength of their arms.  Cleopatraean 
The solemn bringing of the champions at Olimpus. 1. Tugging forth by the strength of their arms.  Olimplickly, 
Cleopatras glorious sailing to meet Anthony.  and not the dimunutiuest nook or creuise of them but is parturient of the like superofficiousnes, 
The solemn bringing of the champions at Olimpus. 1. Tugging forth by the strength of their arms.  arming forth though it be but a catch or pink no capabler then a roundlet or washing bowl, to imp the wings of his convoy. Holy S. Taurbard in what droves the gouty bagd Londoners hurry down and die the watchet air of an iron russet hue with the dust that they raise in hot spurred rowelling it on to perform complementes unto him. One beck more to the balies of the cinque ports, whom I were a ruder Barbarian then Smill the Prince of the Crims& Nagayans if in this action I should forget( having had good cheer at their tables more then once or twice whiles I loytred in this paragonlesse fish town) city, town, country, Robin hood and little John and who not, are industrious and careful to squire and safe conduct him in, but in vshering him in next to the balies of Yarmoth, they trot before all, and play the provost marshals helping to keep good rule the first three weeks of his ingress, and never leave roaring it out with their brazen horn as long as they stay, of the freedoms and immunities soursing from him. being thus entred or brought in the consistorians or settled standards of Yarmouth, commense intestine warres amongst themselves who should give him the largest hospitality, and gather about him as flocking to handsel him and strike him good luck as the Sweetkin Madans did about valiant S. Walter many the martiall tutor unto the black prince( he that built Charterhouse) who being vpon the point of a hazardous journey into France, either to win the horse or lose the saddle( as it runs in the proverb)& taking his leave at Court in a suit of male from top to to, all the ladies clung about him, and would not let him stretch out a step till they had ensettred him with their variable favours, and embroidered over his armor like a gaudy Summer mead, with three scarves, bracelets, chains, ouches: in generous reguerdoment whereof he sacramentally obliged himself, that had the French king as many giants in his country as he hath pears or grapes, and they stood all enranged on the shore to interdict his disimbarking, through the thickest thorny quickset of thē he would pierce, or be tost up to heaven on their spears, but in honour of those debonair Idalian nymphs and their spangled trappings, he would be the first man should set foot in his kingdom, or vnsheath steel against him. As he promised so was his 
many quafi Manly,& from him I take it the Mannies of Kent are descended.  manly blades execution, and in emulation of him, whole herds of knights and gentlemen closed up their right eyes with a piece of silk every one,& vowed never to uncover them or let thē see light, till in the aduancement of their mistress beauties, they had enacted with their brandished bilbowblades some chiualrous Bellerophons trick at arms, that from Salomons islands to S. Magnus corner might cry clang again. O it was a brave age then, and so it is ever, where there are offensive wars, and not defensive,& men fight for the spoil, and not in fear to be spoiled,& are as lions seeking out their pray, and not as sheep that lye still whiles they are prayed on. The red herring is a legate of peace, and so abhorrent from unnatural bloodshed, that if in his quarrel or bandying, who should harbing him, there be any hewing or slashing, or trials of life& death, there where that hang-man embowelling is, his pursuivants or balier return non est inventus, out of one bailiwick he is fled, never to be fastened on there more. The Scotish Iockies or Redshanks( so surnamed of their immoderate raunching up the read shanks or read herrings) uphold& make good the same. Their clacke or gabbling to this purport: How in diebus illis, when Robert de Breaux their good king sent his dear heart to the holy land, for reason he caud not gang thither himself( or then or thereabout, or whilom before, or whilom after, it matters not) they had the staple or fruits of the herring in their road or channel, till a foul ill feud arose amongst his sectaries and servitors, and there was mickle tule, and a black world, and a deal of whinyards drawn about him, and many sacklesse wights and pretty barns run through the tender weambs, and fra thence ne sarry tail of a herring in thilke sound they caud gripe. This language or parley haue I usurped from some of the deftest lads in all edinburgh town, which it will be no impeachment for the wisest to turn loose for a truth, without any diffident wrestling with it. The sumpathy thereunto in our own frothy streams we haue took napping, wherefore without any further bolstring or backing, this Scotish history may bear palm,& if any further bolstring or backing be required, it is evident by the confession of the six hundred Scotish witches executed in Scotland at Bartelmewtide was tweluemoneth, that in Yarmouth road they were all together in a plump on christmas eve was two year when the great flood was,& there stirred up such ternados& furicanos oftempests, in envy( as I collect) that the staple of the herring from them was tranflated to Yarmouth, as will be spoken of there whiles any winds or storms& tempests chafe& puff in the lower region. They and all the seafaring towns under our temperate zone of peace, may well envy her prosperity, but they cannot march cheek by iowle with her or coequal her, and ther's no such manifest sign of great prosperity as a general envy encompassing it. Kings, noble-men it cleaves unto that walk upright, and are any thing happy,& even amongst mean artificers it thrusts in his foot, one of thē envying another if he haue a knack above another, or his gains be greater, and if in his arte they cannot disgrace him, they will find a starting hole in his life that shall confounded him: for example: There is 
John Thurkle  a mathematical Smith or artificer in Yarmouth that hath made a lock and key that weighs but three farthings, and a chest with a pair of knit gloves in the till of it, whose whole poise is no more but a groat, now I do not think but all the Smiths in London, Norwich or york( if they heard of him) would envy him, if they could not outworke him. Hydra herring will haue every thing 
The Sybarites ●… ever would ●… ache any ban●… et under a ●… elue-mo●… this warn●… g.  Sybarite dainty, where he lays knife aboard, or he will fly them, he will not look vpon them. Stately born, stately sprung he is, the best blood of the Ptolomies no statelier, and with what state he hath been used from his swaddling clouts, I haue reiterated unto you, and which is a note above ela, stately Hyperion or the lordly son, the most rutilant planet of the seven, in Lent when Heralius herring enters into his chief reign and scepterdome, skippeth and danseth the goats jump on the earth for ioy of his entrance. Do but mark him on your walls any morning at that season how he sallies& Iaualtos, and you will say I am no fabler. Of so eye bewitching a deaurate ruddy dy is the skincoat of this Lantsgraue, that happy is that nobleman who for his colours in armoury can nearest imitate his chimicall temper, nay which is more, if a man should tell you that god Himens saffron coloured rob were made of nothing but read herrings skins, you would hardly beleeue him: such is the obduracy& hardness of heart of a number of infidels in these dayes, 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 haue no more taste of, then of a dish of stockfish. Somewhere I haue snatched up a jest of a king that was desirous to try what kind of flesh-meat was most nutritive prosperous with a mans body, and to that purpose he commanded four hungry fellowes, in four separate rooms by themselves to bee shut up for a year and a day, whereof the first should haue his gut bombasted with beef and nothing else, till he cried hold belly hold, and so the second to haue his paunch cramd with pork, the third with mutton,& the fourth with veal. At the tweluemonths end they were brought before him,& he inquired of every one orderly what he had eat. Therewith outstept the stallfed foreman that had been at host with the fat ox, and was grown as fat as an ox with tiring on the surloynes, and baft in his face beef, beef, beef. Next the norfolk hog or the swine-wurrier, who had got him a sagging pair of cheeks like a sows paps that gives suck, with the plentiful mast set before him, came lazily wadling in, and puffed out pork, pork, pork. Then the sly sheepe-biter issued into the midst, and summer setted& fliptflapt it twenty times above ground as light as a feather and cried mitton, mitton, mitton, last the Essex calf or lagman, who had lost the calves of his legs with gnawing on the horslegs, shudring and quaking limpte after, with a visage as pale as a piece of white leather, and a staff in his hand and a kirchiefe 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 read herring but as long, he would haue come in hurry, hurry, hurry, 
As much to say as Vrrey, Vrrey, Vrrey one of the principal places where the herring is caught.  as if he were harrying and chasing his enemies,& bevis of Hampton after he had been out of his diet, should not haue been able to haue stood before him. A choleric parcel of food it is, that who so 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,& an Alexander, a Iulius Caesar, a Scanderbega Barbarossa he will prove ere he aspire to thirty,  
But to think on a read Herring, such a hot stirring meate it is, is enough to make the crauenest dastard proclaim fire and sword against spain. The most intenerate virgin wax phisnomy, that taints his throat with the least rib of it, it will embrawne and Iron crust his flesh, and harden his soft bleding 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 against the plague. Too foule-mouthed I am to becollow or becollier, him with such chimnie sweeping attributes of smoking and parching. will you haue the secret of it, this well meaning Pater patriae,& prouiditore and supporter of Yarmouth( which is the lock and key of norfolk) looking pale and sea-sicke 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 dayes, when he vn-houseth him, or hath cast off his shell, he is as freckled about the gils,& looks as read as a Fox, clumme& is more surly to be spoken with then ever he was before, and like Lais of Corinth, will smile vpon no man except he may haue 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 onely they are more by two thousand Last then our own land can spend, but they fill all other lands, to whom at their own prizes they sell them, and happy is he that can first lay hold of them. And how can it bee otherwise, for if Cornish Pilchards otherwise called Fumados, taken on the shore of cornwall, from july to november, bee so saleable as they are in france, spain and Italy,( which are but countefets to the read Herring as Copper to gold, or Ockamie to silver, much more, there elbows itch for ioy, when they meet with the true gold, the true read Herring itself. No true flying fish but he, or if there be, that fish never flies but when his wings are wet, and the read 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 south-west, Estritch-like walks his stations, and the sepulchre, Palmers or Pilgrims, because he is so portable fill their Scrips with them, yea no dispraise to the blood of the Ottamans, the Nabuchedonesor of Constantinople, and Giantly Antaeus that never yawneth nor neezeth 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 yeares before his time, whence with his dove that he taught to peck Barley out of his ear, and brought his Disciples into a fools 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 life time, in self manner it took him in his mounting up to heaven,& so ab inferno nulla redemptio, 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 Turkes, would any antiquary would explicate unto me this remblere or quidditie, 
Turbanto, the great Iawne roll Turkes were about their heads.  whether those Turbanto groutheads, that hang all men by the throats on Iron hooks, even as our Toers hang all there Herrings by the throats on wooden spits, first learned it of our Herring men, or our herringmen of them. Why the Alcheronship of that Belzabub of Saracens, Rhinoceros Zelim aforesaid, should so much delight in this shinie animal I cannot guess, except he had a desire to imitate Midas in eating of gold, or dionysius in stripping of jupiter out of his golden coat; and to shoot my fools boult 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 new found guilded 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,& no mortal food till of late yeares) Midas vnexperienst of the nature of it,( for he was a fool that had asses ears) snapped it up at one blow,& because in the boiling or seathing of it in his maw, he felt it commotion a little and upbraid him, he thought he had eaten gold in deed, and thereupon directed his orisons to Bacchus afresh, to help it out of his crop again, and haue mercy vpon him and recover him, he propensiue inclining to Midas devotion in every thing, 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 ren'ct 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, and Agathocles earthen stuff, they trillild it off before, and that was the first time that any golden cups wervsed.  
Follow this tract in expounding the tale of dionysius and jupiter, and you cannot go amiss. No such jupiter, no such golden coated image was there: but it was a plain golden coated read herring without welt or guard, whom for the strangeness of it( they having never beholded a beast of that hue before) in their temples inshrined for a God, and in somuch as jupiter had shewed thē such slippery pranks more then once or twice, in shifting himself into sundry shapes, and raining himself down in gold into a womans lap, they thought this too might be a rricke of youth in him, to alter himself into the form of this golden Scali-ger, or read herring. And therefore as to jupiter they fell down on their marybones,& lift up their hay-cromes unto him. Now king dionysius being a good wise-fellow, for he was afterwards a schoolmaster,& had played the coatchman to Plato& spit in Aristippus the Philosophers face many a time and oft, no sooner entred their temple,& saw him sit under his canopy so budgely with a whole Goldsmiths stall of jewels and rich offerings at his feet, but to him he stepped, and plucked him from his state with a wennion, then drawing out his knife most iracundiously, at one whiske lopped off his head, and stripped him out of his golden de my or mandillion, and flayed him, and thrust him down his pudding house at a gobbe: yet long it prospered not with him,( so revengeful a just jupiter is the read Herring) for as he tare him from his throne, and vncased him of his habiliments, so in small devolution of yeres, from his throne was he chased, and clean stripped out of his royalty,& glad to go play the school master at Corinth, and take a rod in his hand for his sceptre, and horne-booke Pigmeis for his subiects, idest,( as I intimated some dozen lines before) of a tyrant to become a frowning pedant or schoolmaster.  
Many of you haue red these stories, and could never pick out any such English, no more would you of the ishmael Persians holy, or Mortus ali, they worship, whose true etymology is, mortuum halec, a dead read herring, and no other, though by corruption of speech, they false dialect and misse-sound it. Let any Persian oppugn this, and in spite of his hairy tuft or loue-locke he leaves on the top of his crown, to be pulled up, or pullied up to heaven by, Ile set my foot to his,& fight it out with him, that their fopperly god is not so good as a read Herring. To recount ab●ouo, or from the church-book of his birth, howe the Herring first came to be a fish, and then how he came to be king of fishes, and gradionately, how from white to read he changed, would require as massy a tomb as Hollinshead, but in half a pennyworth of paper I will epitomize them. Let me see, hath any body in Yarmouth heard of Leander and Hero, of whom divine Musaeus sung, and a diviner Muse than him, Kit marlowe?  
two faithful louers they were, as every apprentice in Paules churchyard will tell you for your love, and sel you for your money: the one dwelled at Abidos in Asia, which was Leander, the other which was Hero, his Mistris or Delia, at Sestos in Europe, and she was a pretty pinckany 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 restend, and their towns that like Yarmouth and Leystoffe were stilat wrig wrag,& sucked from their mothers teats serpentine hatred one against each other. Which drove Leander when he durst not deal above board, or be seen aboorde any ship, to sail to his Lady dear, to play the didopper and ducking water spaniel to swim to her, nor that in the day, but by owlelight.  
What will not blind night do for blind Cupid? and what will not blind Cupid do in the night which is his blindmans holiday? By the sea side on the other side stood Heroes tower, such an other tower as one of our Irish castles, that is not so wide as a belfree, and a cobbler cannot iert out his elbows in; a cage or pigeonhouse, romthsome enough to comprehend her and the toothless trot her nurse, who was her onely chatmate and chambermaide; consultiuely by her parents being so encloistred from resort, that she might live chased vestal Priest to Venus the queen of unchastity. Shee would none of that she thanked them, for shee 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 beate from you; the more you think to cross it, the more you bless it, and further it.  
Neither her father nor mother vowed chastity when she was begote, therefore she thought they begot her not to live chased,& either she must prove herself a bastard, or show herself like them. Or Leander you may writ vpon, and it is written vpon, she likte well, and for all he was a naked man, and clean despoiled to the skin, when he sprawled through the brackish suddes to scale her tower, all the strength of it could not hold him out. O ware a naked man, Cithereaes Nunnes haue no power to resist him: and some such quality is ascribed to the lion. Were he never so naked when he came to her, because he should not scare her, she found a means to cover him in her bed,& for he might not take could after his swimming, she lay close by him, to keep him warm. This scuffling or bopeepe in the dark they had a while without weame or bracke, and the old nurse( as there bee three things seldom in their right kind till they bee old, a bawd, a witch, and a midwife) executed the huck string office of her yeres very charily& circumspectly till their shding stars revolted from them: and then for seven dayes together, the wind and the Hellespont contended which should howl louder, the waves dashed up to the clouds, and the clouds on the other side spit and driueld vpon them as fast.  
Hero wept as trickling as the heauens, to think that heaven should so divorce them. Leander stormed worse than the storms, that by them he should be so restrained from his Cinthya. At Sestos was his soul, and he could not abide to tarry in Abidos. rain, snow, hail, or blow it howe it could, into the pitchie hellespont he leaped when the moon and all her torch-bearers were afraid to peep out their heads; but he was peppered for it, he had as good haue took meate, drink, and leisure, for the churlish frampold waves gave him his belly full of fish-broath, ere out of their laundry or washe-house they would grant him his coquet or transire, and not onely that, but they sealde him his quietus est, for curuetting any more to the maiden tower, and tossed his dead carcase, well bathed or parboyled, to the sandy threshold of his leman or orange, for a disiune or morning break fast. All that live long night could she not sleep, she was so troubled with the rheum, which was a sign she should hear of some drowning: Yet towards cocke-crowing she caught a little slumber, and then shee dreamed that Leander and shee were playing at checkestone with pearls in the bottom of the sea.  
You may see dreams are not so vain as they are preached of, though nor in vain, Preachers inveigh against them, and bend themselves out of the peoples mindes, to exhale their foolish superstition. The rheum is the students disease, and who study most, dream most. The labouring mens hands, glow and blister after their dayes work: the glowing and blistring of our brains after our day labouring cogitations are dreams, and those dreams are reeking vapours of no impression, if our matelesse cowches bee not half empty. Hero hoped, and therefore shee dreamed( as all hope is but a dream) her hope was where her heart was, and her heart winding and turning with the wind, that might wind her heart of gold to her, or else turn him from her. Hope and fear both combatted in her, and both these are wakeful, which made her, at break of day( what an old crone is the day, that is so long a breaking) to vnloope her luket or casement, to look whence the blasts came, or what gate or place the sea kept, when forthwith her eyes bread her eye-sore, the first white whereon their transpiercing arrows stuck, being the breathless corps of Leander: with the sudden contemplation of this piteous spectacle of her love, sudden to haddocks meate, her sorrow could not choose but be indefinite, if her delight in him were but indifferent; and there is no woman but delights in sorrow, or she would not use it so lightly for every thing.  
down shee ran in her loose night-gowne, and her hair about her ears( even as Semiramis ran out with her lie-pot in her hand, and her black dangling tresses about her shoulders with her ivory comb ensnarled in them, when she heard that babylon was taken) and thought to haue kist his dead corpse alive again, but as on his blew iellied sturgeon lips, she was about to clap one of those warm plasters, boisterous woolpacks of ridged tides came rolling in, and raught him from her,( with a mind belike to carry him back to Abidos.) At that she became a frantic Bacchanal outright,& made no more bones but sprung after him, and so resignd up her Priesthood, and left work for Musaeus and Kit Marlowe. The gods, and gods and goddesses all on a row bread and crow, from Ops to Pomona, the first apple wife, were so dumpt with this miserable wrack, that they began to abhor al moisture for the seas sake: and jupiter could not endure Ganimed his cup-bearer to come in his presence, both for the dislike he bore to Neptunes baneful haviour, as also that he was so like to Leander. The sun was so in his mumps upon it, that it was almost noon before he could go to cart that day, and then with so ill a will he went, that he had thought to haue topled his burning car or Hurrie curry into the sea( as Phaeton did) to scorch it and dry it up, and at night when he was begrimed with dust and sweat of his journey, he would not descend as he was wont, to wash him in the Ocean, but under a three laid him down to rest in his clothes all night, and so did the scouling moon under another fast by him, which of that are behighted the trees of the sun and moon, and are the same that sir John Mandeuile tells us he spoken with, and that spoken to Alexander. Venus, for Hero was her priest, and juno Lucina the midwifes goddesse, for she was now quickened, and cast away by the cruelty of Aeolus, took bread and salt and eat it, that they would bee smartlie revenged on that truculent windy iailour, and they forgot it not, for Venus made his son and his daughter to committe incest together. Lucina, that there might bee some lasting characters of his shane, helped to bring her to bed of a goodly boy, and Aeolus bolting out al this, heaped murder upon murder.  
The dint of destiny could not be repealed in the reviving of Hero& Leander, but their heavenly hoods in their synod thus decreed, that for they were either of them seaborderers and drowned in the sea, stil to the sea they must belong, and bee divided in habitation after death, as they were in their life time. Leander, for that in a could dark testy night he had his passport to Charon, they terminated to the unquiet could cost of Iseland, where half the year is nothing but murke night, and to that fish translated him, which of us is termed Ling. Hero, for that she was pagled and timpanized, and sustained two losses under one, they footebald their heads together,& protested to make the stem of her loins of all fishes the flaunting Fabian or Palmerin of England, which is cadwalader Herring, and as their meetings were but seldom, and not so oft as welcome, so but seldom should they meet in the heel of the week at the best mens tables, upon Fridayes and Satterdayes, the holy time of Lent exempted, and then they might be at meate and meal for seven weekes together.  
The nurse or mother Mampudding that was a cowring on the back side whiles these things were a tragedizing, lead by the screech or outcry to the prospect of this sorrowful heigh●, as soon as through the raueld button holes of her blear eyes, she had sucked in& received such a revelation of doomsday,& that she saw her mistris mounted a cockhorse,& hoisted away to hell or to heaven on the backs of those rough headed ruffians, down she sunk to the earth, as dead as a door nail, and never mumpt crust after. Whereof their supernalities( having a drop or two of pitty left of the huge hogshead of tears they spent for Hero& Leander) seemed to be something sorry, though they could not weep for it, and because they would bee sure to haue a medicine that should make them weep at all times, to that kind of grain they turned her, which wee call staid, as well for shee was a shrewish snappish bawd, that would bite off a mans nose with an answer, and had rumatique sore eyes that ran always, as that she might accompany Hero& Leander after death, as in hir life time:& hence it is that mustard bites a man so by the nose,& makes him weep& water his plants when he tasteth it:& that Hero& Leander, the read Herring and Ling, never come to the board without mustard, their waiting maid:& if you mark it, mustard looks of the tanned wainscot hue, of such a withered wrinklefaced beldame as she was, that was altered thereinto. loving Hero, how ever altered, had a smack of love stil,& therfore to the cost of louingland ( to Yarmouth near adjoining,& within her liberties of Kirtley road) she accustomend to come in pilgrimage every year, but contentions arising there, and shee remembering the event of the contentions betwixt Sestos and Abidos, that wrought both Leanders death and hers, shuneth it off late, and retireth more northwards, so she shuneth unquiet Humber, because Elstred was drowned there, and the Scots Seas, as before,& every other sea where any blood hath been spilled, for her own seas sake, that spilled her sweet sweet hearts blood and hers.  
Whippet, turn to a new lesson, and strike wee up John for the King, or tell howe the Herring scrambled up to be King of all fishes. So it fel vpon a time and tide, though not upon a holiday, a falconer bringing over certain hawks out of Ireland, and airing them above hatches on ship-boord, and giuing them stones to cast& scour, one of them broken loose from his fist ere he was ware, which being in her kingdom when shee was got upon her wings, and finding herself empty gorged after her casting, up to heaven she towered to seek pray, but there being no game to please her, down she fluttered to the sea again, and a speckled fish playing above the water, at it she strooke, mistaking it for a partridge. A shark or Tuberon that lay gaping for the flying fish hard by, what did me he, but seeing the mark fall so just in his mouth, chopped aloft, and snapped her up belles and all, at a mouthful. The news of this murderous act, carried by the Kings fisher to the ears of the land fowls, there was nothing but arm, arm, arm, to sea, to sea, swallow& titmouse, to take chastisement of that trespass of blood& death committed against a peer of their blood royal. Preparation was made, the muster taken, the leaders allotted, and had their bills to take up pay; an old goshawke for general was appointed, for Marshall of the field a Spathawke, whom for no former desert they put in office, but because it was one of their lineage had sustained that wrong, and they thought they would be more implacable in condoling and commiserating. The Peacocks with their spotted coats and affrighting voices for heralds they pricked and enlisted, and the cockadoodling cocks for their trumpeters,( look vpon any cock, and look vpon any trumpeter, and see if he look not as read as a cock after his trumpeting, and a cock as read as he after his crowing.) The kistrilles or windfuckers that filling themselves with wind, fly against the wind evermore, for their fulsailed standerdbearers, the Cranes for pikemen, and the woodcocks for demilances, and so of the rest every one according to that place by nature he was most apt for. Away to the lands end they trigge all the skie-bred chirpers of them, when they came there, Aequora nos terrent& ponti tristis imago, They had wings of good will to fly with, but no webs on their feet to swim with, for except the waterfoules had mercy vpon them, and stood their faithful confederates and backe-friends, on their backs to transport them, they might return home like good fools, and gather straws to build their nests, or fall to their old trade of picking worms. In sum, to the water fowls vnanimately they recourse, and besought duck, and Drake, swan and Goose Halcions& Seapies, Cormorants& Sea-guls of their oary assistance,& aydeful furtherance in this action.  
They were not obdurate to be entreated, though they had little cause to reuenge the hawks quarrel from them, having received so many high displeasures, and slaughters, and rapines of their race, yet in a general prosecution private feuds they trode underfoot, and submitted their endeavours to be at their limitation in every thing.  
The puffin that is half fish, half flesh( a John indifferent, and an ambidexter betwixt either) bewrayed this conspiracy to Protaeus herds, or the fraternity of fishes, which the greater giants of Russia& iceland, as the whale, the sea horse, the Norse, the wasserman, the Dolphin the Grampoys fleered and geered at as a ridiculous danger, but the lesser pigmeis& spawn of them, thought it meet to provide for themselves betime, and elect a king amongst them that might deraine them to battle, and under whose colours they might march against these birds of a feather, that had so colleagued themselves together to destroy them.  
Who this king should bee, beshackled their wits, and laid them a dry ground every one. No ravening fish they would put in arms, for fear after he had euerted their foes, and fleshed himself in blood, for interchange of diet, he would raven up them.  
Some politic delegatory Scipio, or witty pated Petito, like the heir of Laertes per apheresin, Vlysses,( well known unto them by his prolixious seawandering, and dancing on their toplesse tottering hills) they would single forth, if it might bee, whom they might depose when they list, if he should begin to cicatrise, and such a one as of himself were able to make a sound party if all failed, and bid base to the enemy with his own kindred and followers.  
None won the day in this but the Herring, whom al their clamorous suffrages saluted with vive le roy, God save the King, God save King, save only the Playse and the Butte, that made wry mouths at him, and for their mocking haue wry mouths ever since, and the Herring ever since wears a coronet on his head, in token that he is as he is. Which had the worst end of the staff in that sea journey or canuazado, or whether some fowler with his nets( as this host of fethermungers were getting up to ride double) involved or entangled them, or the water fowls played them false( as there is no more love betwixt them, then betwixt sailors and land soldiers) and threw them off their backs, and let them drown when they were launched into the deep, I leave to some Alfonsus) Poggius or aesop to vnwrap, for my pen is tired in it: but this is notorious, the Herring from that time to this, hath gone with an army, and never stirs abroad without it, and when he stirs abroad with it, he sends out his scowts or sentinels before him, that oftentimes are intercepted, and by their parti-coloured liveries described, whom the mariners after they haue took, use in this sort: eight or nine times they swinge them about the main mast, and bid them bring them so many last of Herrings as they haue swinged them times, and that shall be their ransom, and so throw them into the sea, again. King by your leave, for in your kingshippe I must leave you, and repeat how from white to red you camelionized.  
It is to bee red, or to bee heard of, howe in the Punieship or nonage of Cerdicke sands, when the best houses and walls there were of mud or canuaze, or Poldauies entiltments, a Fisherman of Yarmouth having drawn so many herrings he wist not what to do withall, hung the residue that he could not sel nor spend, in the sooty roof of his shed a drying: or say thus, his shed was a acbbinet in decimo sexto, builded on four crutches, and he had no room in it, but in that garret or Excelsis to lodge them, where if they were dry, let them bee dry, for in the sea they had drunk too much, and now he would force them do penance for it.  
The weather was cold, and good fires he kept,( as fishermen, what hardness soever they endure at sea, they will make all smoke, but they will make amendes for it when they come to land) and what with his firing and smoking, or smoky firing in that his narrow lobby, his herrings which were as white as whales bone when he hung them up, now looked as read as a lobster. It was four or five dayes before either he or his wife espied it,& when they espied it, they fell down on their knees& blessed themselves,& cried, a miracle, a miracle,& with the proclaiming it among their neighbours they could not be content, but to the court the fisherman would, and present it to the King, then lying at borough Castle two mile off.  
Of this borough Castle, because it is so ancient, and there hath been a city there, I will enter into some more special mention. The flood Waueny running through many towns of high suffolk up to Bungey, and from thence encroaching nearer and nearer to the sea, with his twining& winding it cuts out an island of some amplitude, name Louingland. The head town in that island is Leystofe, in which bee it known to all men I was born, though my father sprung from the Nashes of Herefordshire.  
The next town from Leystofe towards Yarmouth is Corton, and next Gorlston. More inwardly on the left hand, where Waueny and the river jerus mix their waters, Cnoberi urbs, the city of Cnober, at this day termed Burgh or Borough Castle, had his being.  
This city and castle saith Bede and master cambden, or rather M. cambden out of Bede, by the woods about it, and the driving of the sea up to it, was most pleasant. In it one Furfaeus a Scot builded a monastery, at whose persuasion Sigebert king of the east Angles, gave over his kingdom and lead a monastical life there, but forth of that monastery he was haled against his will, to encourage his subiects in their battle against the Mercians, where he perished with them.  
Nothing of that Castle save tartered ragged walls now remaines, framed four square, and overgrown with briars and bushes, in the stubbing up of which, erst whiles they dig up roman coins, and booies and anchors. Well, thither our Fisherman set the best leg before, and vnsardled to the King, his whole sachel of wonders. The King was as superstitious in worshipping those miraculous herrings at the fisherman, licensed him to carry thē up& down the realm for strange monsters, giuing to Cerdek sands( the birth place of such monstrosities) many privileges, and in that the quantity of them that were caught so increased, he assigned a broken sluice in the island of Louingland, called Herring fleet, where they should disburden and discharge their boats of them, and render him custom. Our Herring smoker having worn his monsters stale throughout England, spirted over seas to Rome with a peddlers pack of thē in the papal chair of Vigilius, he that first instituted Saints eeues or Vigils to be fasted. By that time he came thither, he had but three of his Herrings left, for by the way he fell into the thievish hands of malcontents, and of launceknights, of whom he was not only robbed of all his money, but was fain to redeem his life besides with the better parte of his ambry of burnished fishes  
These herrings three he rubbed and curried over till his arms ached again, to make them glow and glare like a turkey brooch, or a London Vintners sign, thick iagged, and round fringed, with theaming Arsadine, and folding them in a diaper napkin as lily white as a Ladies marrying smock, to the market stead of Rome he was so bold as to prefer them, and there on a high stool, vnbraced and vnlaced them, to any chapmans eye that would buy them. The Popes caterer casting a licorous glance that way, asked what it was he had to sell: the king of fishes he answered: the king of fishes replied he, what is the price of him? A hundred ducats he told him: a hundred ducats quoth the Popes caterer, that is a kingly price indeed, it is for no private man to deal with him: then he is for me said the Fisherman, and so unsheathed his cuttle-bong, and from the nape of the neck to the tail dismembered him, and pauncht him up at a mouthful. Home went his Beatitudes caterer with a flay in his ear, and discoursed to his Holinesse what had happened. Is it the king of fishes? the Pope frowningly shooke him up like a cat in a blanket, and is any man to haue him but I that am king of kings, and lord of lords? Go give him his price I command thee, and let me taste of him incontinently. back returned the Caterer like a dog that had lost his tail, and powred down the herringmerchant his hundred ducats for one of those two of the king of fishes vnsolde, which then he woul dnot take, but stood upon two hundred. thereupon they broken off, the one urging that he had offered it him so before, and the other, that he might haue took him at his proffer, which since he refused, and now halperd with him: as he eat up the first, so would he eat up the second, and let Pope or patriarch of Constantinople fetch it out of his belly if they could: he was as good as his word, and had no sooner spoken the word, but he did as he spoken. With a heavy heart to the palace the yeoman of the mouth departed, and rehearsed this second il success, wherewith Peters successor was so in his mulliegrums that he had thought to haue buffeted him,& cursed him with bell book& candle, but he ruled his reason,& bade him, though it cost a million, to let him haue that third that restend behind, and high him expeditely thither, lest some other snatched it up, and as fast from thence again, for he swore by his triple crown, no crumb of refection would he gnaw vpon, till he had sweetened his lips with it.  
So said, so done, thither he flew as swift as Mercury, and threw him his two hundred ducats, as he before demanded. It would not fadge, for then the market was raised to three C. and the Caterer grumbling thereat, the fisher swain was forward to settle him to his tools, and tyre vpon it, as on the other two, had not he held his hands, and desired him to keep the peace for no money should part them: with that speech he was qualified, and pursed the three hundred ducats, and delivered him the king of fishes, teaching him how to geremumble it, sauce it, and dress it, and so sent him away a glad man. All the Popes cookes in their white sleeves and linen aprons met him middle way, to entertain and receive the king of fishes, and together by the ears they went, who should first handle him or touch him: but the clerk of the kichin appeased that strife, and would admit none bu thim self to haue the scorching and carbonadoing of it, and he kissed his hand thrice, and made as many Humblessos ere he would finger it: and such obeysances performed, he dressed it as he was enjoined, kneeling on his knes, and mumbling twenty aue Maryes to himself in the sacrificing of it on the coals, that his diligent service in the broiling and combustion of it, both to his kingship and to his fatherhood might not seem vnmeritorious. The fire had not perst it, but it being a sweaty loggerhead greasy souter, endungeond in his pocket a tweluemonth, stunk so over the popes palace, that not a scullion but cried foh, and those which at the first flocked the fastest about it, now fled the most from it, and sought more to rid their hands of it, than before they sought to bless their hands with it. with much stoping of their noses, between two dishes they stued it, and served it up. It was not come within three chambers of the Pope, but he smelled it, and vpon the smelling of it inquiring what it should be that sent forth such a puissant perfume, the standards by declared that is was the king of fishes: I conceited no less said the Pope, for less than a king he could not be that had so strong a sent, and if his breath be so strong, what is he himself? like a great king, like a strong king I will use him, let him be carried back I say, and my cardinals shall fetch him in with dirge and processions under my canopy.  
Though they were double and double weary of him, yet his Edict being a lawe, to the kitchen they returned him, whither by and by the whole college of scarlet Cardinalles, with their crosiers, their censors, their hosts, their Agnus deies and crucifixes, flocked together in heaps as it had been to the conclave or a general counsel, and the signior cardinal that stood next in election to bee Pope, heaved him up from the Dresser with a dirge of De profundis natus est fex, rex he should haue said, and so haue made true latin, but the spirable odour& pestilent steam ascending from it, put him out of his bias of congruity,& as true as the truest latin of Priscian would haue queazened him, like the damp that took both Bell and Baram away, and many a worthy man that day, if he had not been protected under the Popes canopy, and the other Cardinalles with their holi-water sprinkles, quenched his foggy fume and euaporating. About and about the inward and base court they circumducted him, with Kirielyson and hallelujah, and the chaunters in their golden copes and white surplesses, chanted it out above gloria patri, in praising of him, the Organs played, the Ordonance at the Castle of Saint Angelos went off, and all wind instruments ble was loud as the wind in winter, in his passado to the Popes ordinary or dining chamber, where having set him down, upon their faces they fell flat, and licked every one his ell of dust, in douking on all four unto him.  
The bufie epitasis of the comedy was, when the dishes were vncouered, and the swarthrutter sour took air, for then he made such an air, as Alcides himself that cleansed the stables of Agaeus nor any ostler was able to endure.  
This is once, the Pope it popt under board, and out of his palace worse it scared him then Neptunes Phocases, that scared the horses of hippolytus, or the harpies Iupiters dogges sent to vex Phineus; the Cardinalles were at their ora pro nobis, and held this suffocation a meet sufferance for so contemning the king of fishes and his subiects, and fleshly surfeiting in their carniualles. Negromantick sorcery, negromanticke sorcery, some evil spirit of an heretic it is, which thus molesteth his Apostoliqueship. The friars and monks caterwawled from the abbots and priors to the novices, wherefore tanquam in circo, wee will trownse him in a circled, and make him tell what Lanterneman, or groom of Hecates close stool he is, that thus nefarrously and proditoriously profaning & penetrates our holy fathers nostrils, what needs there any more ambages, the ringoll or ringed circled was compassed and chalked out, and the king of fishes by the name of the king of fishes, conjured to appear in the center of it, but surdo cantant absurdi, siue surdum, incantant fratres sordidi, he was a king absolute, and woul dnot be at every mans call,& if friar Pendela and his fellowes had any thing to say to him, in his admiral court of the sea, let them seek him, and neither in Hull, Hell, nor Halifax.  
They seeing that by their charms and spells they could spell nothing of him, fell to a more charitable suppose, that it might bee the distressed soul of some king that was drowned, who being long in purgatory, and not relieved by the prayers of the church, had leave in that disguised form, to haue egress and regress to Rome, to crave their benevolence of dirges, trentals, and so forth, to help him onward on his journey to Limbo patrum or elysium, and because they woul dnot easily beleeue what tortures in purgatory he had sustained, unless they were eye-witnesses of them, he thought to represent to all their sences the image and Idea of his combustion and broiling there, and the horrible stinch of his sins accompanying both under his frying and broiling on the coals in the Popes kitchen,& the intolerable finel or stink he sent forth under either. Una voice in this spleen to Pope Vigilius they ran, and craved that this king of fishes might first haue christian burial, next, that he might haue masses sung for him, and last, that for a saint he would canonize him. Al these he granted, to bee rid of his filthy redolence, and his chief casket wherein he put all his jewels, he made the coffin of his enclosure, and for his ensainting, look the almanac in the beginning of april, and see if you can find out such a saint as saint Gildarde, which in honour of this guilded fish the Pope so ensainted: nor there he restend and stopped, but in the mitigation of the very embers whereon he was sindged, that after he was taken of them, fumed most fulsomly of his fatty droppings) he ordained ember weekes in their memory, to be fasted everlastingly.  
I had well nigh forgot a special point of my Romish history,& that is how Madam Celina Cornificia, one of the curiosest courtesans of Rome, when the famed of the king of fishes was canon-rored in her eats, shee sent all hir jewels to the jewish lumbarde to pawn, to buy and encaptiue him to her trenchour, but her purue your came a day after the faire,& as he came, so he fared, for not a scrap of him but the cobs of the two Herrings the Fisherman had eaten remained of him, and those Cobbes, rather than he would go home with a sleeveless answer, he bought at the rate of fourscore ducats( they were rich cobbes you must rate them) and of them all cobbing country chuffes which make their bellies and their bags their Gods are called rich Cobbes. every man will not clap hands to this stale, the Norwichers imprimis, who say, the first guilding of Herrings was deducted from them: and after this guise they tune the accent of their speech, how that when Castor was Norwich( a town two mile beyond this Norwich, that is termed to this day Norwich Castor, and having monuments of a castle in it environing fifty acres of ground, and ringbolts in the walls whereto ships were fastened) our Norwich now vpon her legs was a poor fisher town, and the sea spawled and springed up to her common stairs in Confur street.  
All this may pass in the queens peace, and no man say bo to it: but bawwaw quoth Bagshaw to that which drawlacheth behind, of the first taking of herrings there, and currying and guylding them amongst thē, whereof if they could whisper to us any simplo likelihood, or rawbond carcase of reason, more than their imaginary dream of Guilding cross in their parish of S. saviours( now stumpt up by the roots) so name, as they would haue it, of the smoky guilding of herrings there first invented, I could well haue allowed of, but they must bring better cards ere they win it from Yarmouth.  
As good a toy to mock an ape was it of him that shewed a country fellow the read sea, where all the read Herrings were made( as some places in the sea where the sun is most transpercing, and beats with his rays feruentest, will look as read as blood:) and the jest of a scholar in Cambridge, that standing angling on the town bridge there, as the country people on the market day passed by, secretly baited his hook with a read Herring with a bell about the neck, and so conveying it into the water that no man perceived it, all on the sudden, when he had a competent throng gathered about him, up he twicht it again, and laid it openly before them, whereat the gaping rural fools, driven into no less admiration than the common people about London some few yeares since were at the bubbling of Moore-ditch, swore by their christendomes that as many dayes and yeeres as they had lived, they never saw such a miracle of a read herring taken in the fresh-water before. That greedy seagull ignorance is apt to devour any thing. For a new messiah they are ready to expect of the bedlam hatmakers wife by London bridge, he that proclaymes himself Elias, and saith he is inspired with mutton and porredge, and with them it is currant, that Don Sebastian king of Portugall( slain twenty yeares since with Stukeley at the battle of Alcazar) is raised from the dead like Lazarus, and alive to be seen at Venice. Let them look to themselves as they will, for I am theirs to guile them better than ever I haue done, and this I am sure I haue distributed gudgeon dole amongst them, as Gods plenty as any stripling of my slender portion of wit far or near. They needs will haue it so, much good do it them, I can not do withal: For if but carelessly betwixt sleeping and waking I writ I know not what against plebeian Publicans and sinners( no better than the sworn brothers of candlestick turners and tinkers) and leave some terms in suspense that my post-haste want of argent will not give me elbow room enough to explain or examine as I would, out steps me an infant squib of the inns of Court, that hath not half greased his dining cap, or scarce warmed his Lawyers cushion, and he to approve himself an extravagant statesman catcheth hold of a rush, and absolutely concludeth, it is meant of the Emperour of Ruscia, and that it will utterly mar the traffic into that country if all the Pamphlets bee not called in and suppressed, wherein that libeling word is mentioned. An other, if but a head or a tail of any beast, he boasts of in his crest or his scutcheon, be reckoned up by chance in a volume where a man hath just occasion to reckon up all beasts in armoury, he straight engageth himself by the honor of his house, and his never reculed sword to thrash down the hayry roof of that brain that so seditiously mutined against him with the mortiferous bastinado, or cast such an uncurable Italian trench in his face, as not the basest creeper vpon pattens by the high way side, but shall abhor him worse than the carrion of a dead corpse, or a man hanged up in gibbets.  
I will deal more boldly,& yet it shall be securely, and in the way of honesty, to a number of Gods fools, that for their wealth might be deep wise men, and so forth( as now a daies in the opinion of the best lawyers of England there is no wisdom without wealth, allege what you can to the contrary of all the beggarly sages of greece) these I say out of some discourses of mine, which were a mingle mingle-mangle cumputre, and I knew not what to make of myself, haue fished out such a deep politic state meaning as if I had al the secrets of court or common-wealth at my fingers ends. talk I of a bear, O it is such a man that emblazons him in his arms, or of a wolf, a fox, or a chameleon, any lording whom they do not affect, it is meant by. The great potentate stirred up with those perverse applications, not looking into the text itself, but the ridiculous comment, or if he looks into it, follows no other more charitable comment then that, straite thunders out his displeasure,& showers down the whole tempest of his indignation vpon me, and to amend the matter, and fully absolve himself of this rash error of misconstruing, he commits it over to be prosecuted by a worse misconstruer then himself, vidilicet, his learned counsel( God forgive me if I slander them with that title of learned, for generally they are not) and they being compounded of nothing but vociferation and clamour, rage& fly out they care not howe against a mans life, his person, his parentage, two houres before they come to the point, little remembering their own privy scapes with their laundresses, or their night walks to Pancredge, together with the hobnaylde houses of their carterly ancestrie from whence they are sprung, that haue coold plow-lades buttocks time out of mind, with the breath of their whistling, and with retailing their dung to manure lands, and selling straw and chaff, scracht up the pence to make them gentlemen. But Lord howe miserable do these ethnics when they once march to the purpose, set words on the tenters, never reading to a period( which you shal scarce find in thirty sheets of a lawyers declaration) whereby they might comprehend the entire sense of the writer together, but disioynt and tear every syllable betwixt their teeth severally, and if by no means they can make it odious, they will be sure to bring it in disgrace by ill-favoured mouthing and missounding it. These bee they that use mens writings like bruit beasts, to make them draw which way they list, at a principal agent in church controversies of this our time complaineth. I haue read a tale of a poor man and an advocate, which poor man complained to the King of wrong that the advocate had done him, in taking away his cow. The king made him no answer but this, that he would send for the advocate, and hear what he could say. Nay quoth the poor man, if you bee at that pass that you will pause to hear what he will say, I haue utterly lost my cow, for he hath words enough to make fools of ten thousand. So he that shal haue his lives bandied by our usual plodders in Fitzherbart, let him not care whether they bee right or wrong: for they will writhe and turn them as they list, and make the author beleeue he meant that which he never did mean: and for a knitting up conclusion, his credite is vnrepriueably lost, that on bare suspicion in such cases, shal but haue his name controverted amongst thē,& if I should fall into their hands, I would be pressed to death for obstinate silence, and never seek to clear myself, for it is in vain, since both they will confounded a mans memory with their tedious babbling, and in the first three words of his Apology with impudent exclamations interrupt him, when as their mercenary tongues( lye they never so loudly) without check or control must haue their free passage for five houres together.  
I speak of the worse sort, not of the best, whom I hold in high admiration, as well for their singular gifts of art and nature, as their vntaynted consciences with corruption: and from some of them I avow I haue heard as excellent things flow, as ever I observed in Tully or Demosthenes. Those that were present at the arraignment of Lopus,( to insist in no other particular) hereof I am sure will bear me record. Latinelesse dolts saturnine heavy headed blunderers, my invective hath relation, to such as count al Artes puppet-playes, and pretty rattles to please children, in comparison of their confused barbarous lawe, which if it were set down in any christian language, but the Getan tongue it would never grieve a man to study it.  
neither ovid nor Ariosto could by any persuasions of their parents be induced to study the civil law for the harshness of it, how much more,( had they been alive at this day, and born in our nation) would they haue consented to study this uncivil Norman horpotch, this sow of led, that hath never a ring at the end to lift it up by, is without head or foot, the deformedest monster that may bee. I stand lawing here what with these lawyers, and self-conceited misinterpreters so long, that my red herring which was hot broiling on the coals, is waxed stark could for want of blowing. Haue with them for a riddle or two, onely to set their wits a nibbling, and their iobbernowles a working, and so good night to their signories, but with this indentment and caution, that though there be neither time nor reason in it,( as by my good will there shal not) they according to their accustomend gentle favours, whether I will or no, shall supply it with either, and run over al the peers of the land in peevish moralizing and anatomizing it.  
There was a Herring, or there was not, for it was but a cropshin, one of the refuse sort of herrings, and this herring or this cropshin was rinsed and thurified in the smoke, and had got him a svit of durance, that would last longer then one of Erra Paters almanacs, or a cunstables brown bill, onely his head was in his tail, and that made his breath so strong, that no man could abide him. Well, he was a Triton of his time, and a sweet singing calander to the state, yet not beloved of the shoury Pleyades or the Colossus of the sun, however he thought himself another tumidus Antimachus, as complete an Adelantado as he that is known by wearing a cloak of tuftaffatie eighteen year, and to Lady Turbut there is no demur but he would needs go a wooing, and offered her for a dower whole hecatombs and a twoo-hand-sword, shee starde vpon him with Megaras eyes, like Iris the messenger of juno, and bad him go cate a fools head and garlic, for she would none of him, thereupon particularly strictly and usually he replied, that though thunder nere lights on Phoebus three, and Amphion that worthy musician, was husband to Niobe, and there was no such acceptable incense to the heauens as the blood of a traitor, revenged he would bee by one Chimera of imagination or other, and hamper and embrake her in those mortal straights for hir disdain, that in spite of divine simnietry& miniature, into her buskie grove shee should let him enter, and bid adieu sweet Lord, or the cramp of death should wrest her heart strings.  
This speech was no spireable odour to the Achelous of her audience, wherefore she charged him by the extreme lineaments of the Erimanthian bear, and by the privy fistula of the Pierides, to committe no more such excruciating syllables to the yielding air, for she would sooner make her a French-hood of a cowsharde and a gown of spiders webs, with the sleeves drawn out with cabbages, then be so contaminated any more with his abortive loathely motives: With this in an olympic rage, he calls for a clean shirt, and puts on five pair of bufkins, and seeketh out eloquent Zenophon, out of whose mouth the Muses spake, to declaim in open court against her.  
The action is entred, the complaint of her wintered brows presented, of a violent rape of his heart shee is indicted and convinced. The circumstance that follows you may imagine or suppose: or without supposing or imagining, I will tell you, the nut was cracked, the strife discussed, and the center of her heart laid open, and to this wild of sorrows and excruciament she was confined, either to bee held a flat thornback, or sharp pricking dog-fish to the weal public, or seal herself close to his seale-skind riueld lips, and suffer herself as a spirit to be conjured into the hellish circled of his embraces.  
It would not be good cropshin, Madam Turbut could not away with such a dry withered carcase to lye by her, currat rex, vivat lex, come what would, shee would none of him, wherefore as a poisoner of mankind with her beauty, she was adiudged to be boiled to death in hot scalding water, and to haue her posterity thoroughly sawst and sowst and pickled in barrels of brinish tears, so ruthful and dolorous, that the inhabitants on Bosphoros should bee laxative in deploring it. O for a Legion of mice-eyed decipherers and calculaters upon characters, now to augurate what I mean by this; the divell, if it stood vpon his salvation cannot do it, much less petty divels, and cruel Rhadamants upon earth,( else where in France and Italy subintelligitur, and not in our aspicious island climate) men that haue no means to purchase credit with their Prince, but by putting him still in fear, and beating into his opinion, that they are the onely preservers of his life, in sitting up night and day in sifting out treasons, when they are the most traitors themselves, to his life, health, and quiet, in continual commacerating him with dread and terror, when but to get a pension, or bring him in their debt next to God, for upholding his vital breath, it is neither so, nor so, but some fool, some drunken man, some mad man in an intoxicate humour hath uttered he knew not what, and they being starved for intelligence, or want of employment, take hold of it with tooth and nail, and in spite of all the waiters, will violently break into the kings chamber, and awake him at midnight to reveal it.  
Say that a more piercing lynceus sight should dive into the entrails of this insinuating parasites 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 shal concern the Princes life, and his crown and dignity, and bring himself in such necessary request about his prince, as he may hold him for his right hand, and the onely 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 Iesus Christ, then abide it any longer. I am not against it,( for God forbid I should) that it behooves all loyal true subiects to bee vigilant and jealous for their princes safety, and certain too jealous and vigilant of it they cannot bee, if they bee 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 hurliburlie in the realm vpon had I wist, not so much for any zeal or love to their princes, or tender care of their preservation, as to pick thankes, and cury a little favour, that thereby they may lay the foundation to build a suit on, or cross some great enemy they haue, I will maintain it is most lewd and detestable. I accuse none, but such there haue been belonging to Princes in former ages, if there bee not at this hour.  
Stay, let me look about, where am I in my text, or out of it? not out for a groat: out for an angel, nay I'll lay no wagers, for now I perponder more sadlie upon it, I think I am out indeed. bear with it, it was but a pretry parenthesis of Princes and their parasites, which shall do you no harm, for I will cloy you with Herring before wee part.  
Will you haue the other riddle of the cropshin to make up the pair that I promised you, you shall you shall( not haue 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 then the former, and yet I pray you what fault can you find with the former, hath it any more sense in it then it should haue? is it not right of the merry cobblers cut in that witty Play of, the Case is altered.  
I will speak a proud word( though it may bee counted arrogancy in me to praise mine own stuff) if it bee not more absurd then Philips his Venus, 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 spirites, and warm my brain.  
My readers peradventure may see more into it then I can, for in comparison of them, in whatsocuer I set forth, I am Bernardus non vidit omnia, as blind as blind Bayard, and haue the eyes of a beetle, nothing from them is obscure, they being quicker sighted then the sun, to spy in his beams the moats 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 more to the red herring.  
Howe many bee there in the world that childishly deprave Alchumy, and cannot spell the first letter of it; in the black book of which ignorant band of scorners, it may be I am scorde up with the highest, if I be, I must entreat them to wipe me out, for the read herring hath lately been my ghostly father to convert me to their faith: the probatum est of whose transfiguration ex Luna in Solem, from his dusky tin hue into a perfect golden blandishment, onely 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 bee made by an artificial repurified flamme, 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 Alcumy written vpon it, so if wee should examine matters to the proof, wee should find the red Herrings skin to be little less: the accidence of Alcumy 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 kanne or quart pox round about the mouth with it, let the cunningest lickespiggot swelled his heart out, the beer shal never foam or froth in the cup, whereby to deceive men of their measure, but be as settled as if it stood al night.  
Next, to draw on hounds to a sent, to a red herring skin there is nothing comparable. The round or cobbe of it dried and beaten to powder is ipse ille against the ston: and of the whole body of itself, the finest Ladies beyond seas frame their kickshawes.  
The rebel jack Cade was the first that devised to put red herrings in cades, and from him they haue their name. now as wee call it the swinging of herrings when he 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 onely 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 more, who with the same Graeca fide I marted unto you the former, was the first that put the red herring in straw over head and ears like beggars,& the Fishermen vpon that jack strawd him ever after:& some, for he was so begarly a knave that challenged to be a gentleman, and had no wit nor wealth but what he got by the warm wraping up of herring, raised this proverb of him, Gentleman jack Herring that puts his breeches on his head for want of wearing. Other disgraceful proverbs of the herring there be, as, Nere a barrel better herring: Neither flesh nor fish, nor good read herring, which those that haue bitten with ill bargains of either sort, haue dribd forth in reuenge, and yet not haue them from Yarmouth, many cost towns besides it, enterpriseing to cury 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 with Poet Martiall for calling it putre halec, the scald rotten herring, but he meant that of the fat reasty Scottish herrings, which will endure no salt, and in one month( bestow what cost on them you will) wax ramish if they be kept, whereas our embarreld white herrings, flourishing with the stately brand of Yarmouth vpon them, scilicet 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 onely are famous at rouen, Paris, deep, Cane( whereof the first, which is rouen, serveth all the high countries of france with it, and deep which is the last save one, victuals all Picardy with it) but heereat home is made account of like a marquis, and received at court right solemnly, I care not much if I rehearse to you the maner, 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 sand them as a homage to the lord of Caster hard by there, for lands that they hold of him, who presently vpon the like tenor, in bounce hampers covered over with his cloth of arms, sees them conveyed to the court in the best equipage: at court when they are arrived, his man rudely enters not at first, but knocketh very civilly, and then officers come and fetch him in with torch light, where having disfraughted and vnloaded his luggage, to supper he sets him down like a Lord, with his wax lights before him, and hath his mess of meate allowed him with the largest,& his horses( quatenus horses) are prouendred as epicurely: after this, some four mark see towards his charges is tendered him, and he iogges home again merrily.  
A white pickled herring? why it is meate for a Prince, hance Vanderuecke of Roterdame( 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 Caesarean charlemagne herring, Plinie and Gesner were too blame they sluberd thee over so negligently. I do not see why any man should envy thee, since thou art none of these lurcones or epulones, glutons or fleshpots of Egypt( as one that writes of the christians captivity under the turk enstileth us English men) nor livest thou by the vnlyuing or euiscerating 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 onely by the water arte thou nourished, and nought else, and must swim as well dead as alive.  
Be of good cheer my weary Readers, for I haue espied land, as Diogenes said to his weary Schollers when he had red to awaste 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 wrestling: 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 fisherman.  
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, Periurij poenas repetit ille locus, it is a place like Hel, good for nothing but to punish periurers; with innumerable invectives more against it throughout in every book.  
Plautus in his Rudens bringeth in fishermen cowthring and quaking dung wet after a storm, and complaining their miserable case in this form, Captamus cibum è mari, sieuent us non venit, neque quicquam captum est piscium, salsilautique domum redimus clancubnn, dormimus incoenatum: All the meate that we eat we catch out of the sea, and if there wee miss, well washed and salted, wee sneak home to bed supperless: and vpon the tail of it he brings in a parasite that flowteth and bourdeth them thus: Heus vos familica gens bominum vt viuitis vt peritis? hough you hungerstarued gubbins or offalles of men, how thrive you, howe perish you, and they cringing in their necks, like rats, smothered in the hold, poorly replicated, Viuimus famed, speque sitique, with hunger, and hope, and thirst wee content ourselves. If you would not misconceit that I studiously intended your defamation, you should haue thick haileshot of these.  
Not the lousy riddle 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, with eight score more galliarde crossepoynts, and kickshiwinshes of giddy care-wig brains, were it not I thought you too fretful and choleric with feeding altogether on salt meats, to haue 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 heires of the Prophet jonas, that you are all cavaliers and Gentlemen since the king of fishes vouchsafed you for his subiects, that for your selling smoke you may be courtiers, for your keeping of fasting dayes Friar observants, and lastly, that look in what town there is the sign of the three mariners, the huffe-cappest drink in that house you shal be sure of always.  
No more can I do for you than I haue done, were you my god-children every one: God make you his children and keep you from the Dunkerks, and then I doubt not but when you are driven into harbour by foul weather, the kannes shall walk to the health of Nashes Lenten-stuffe, and the praise of the red Herring, and even those that attend upon the pitchkettle, will bee drunk to my good fortuues, and recommendums. One boon you must not refuse me in,( if you be bonisocij and sweet Oliuers) that you let not your rusty sword sleep in their scabberds, but lash them out in my quarrel as hotly, as if you were to cut cables, or hue the main mast over board, when you hear me mangled and torn in mennes mouths about this playing with a shettlecocke, or tossing empty bladders in the air.  
Alas poor hungerstarued Muse, wee shall haue some spawn of a goose-quill or over worn pander quirking and girding, was it so hard driven that it had nothing to feed vpon but a red herring? another drudge of the pudding house( all whose lawful means to live by throughout the whole year will scarce purchase him a red herring) says I might as well haue writ of a dogges turd( in his teeth surreuerence.) But let none of these scum of the subvrbs, be too vinegar tart with me; for if they bee, Ile 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, werescullions dishwash,& dirty draff and swill set against a red herring. The puissant read herring, the golden Hesperides read herring, the Meonian read herring, the read herring of read Herrings hall, every pregnant peculiar of whose resplendent land 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 facunditie, and abate the haughtiest poetical fury twixt this and the burning Zone, and the tropic of Cancer. My conceit is cast into a sweeting sickness, with ascending these few steps of his renown: into what a hote broiling saint Laurence fever 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 for france, Saint james for spain, Saint patrick for Ireland. Saint George for England, and the read Herring for Yarmouth.  
( {inverted⁂})  
FINIS.