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NASH'S 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 RED-HERRING.
Fit for all Clerks of Noblemen's kitchens to be read; and not
unnecessary by all Serving-Men, who have short Boardwages, and to be remembered.
Famam peto per undas.
i
Edited by CI/ARLES HINDLEY.
LONDON:
REEVES AND       TURNER,
196, STRAND,
(Opposite St. Clement Danes Church).
1871.




2 9
bi    5  -? -,,O,.s I.., le
I ,Ol I
'If, iol




-o....NA.
INTRODUCTION.
MASH'S LENTEN STUFF was the last written work of its author,
and which the learned and industrious John Payne Collier somewhat
aptly designates as a "lively paradoxical Praise of the Red-Herring,
and a highly humorous and ingenious performance, which must-he
adds-have been written when its author was in high health and spirits."
In I598 Nash, after his return from Ireland, visited the town of Great Yarmouth, as he informs us, for five or six weeks.  "I arrived," he says, "at the. latter end of autumn, where having scarce looked about me, my presaging
1 mind said to itself, Hiefavonius serenus est kic auster umbricus, this is a predestinated fit place for Pierce Penniless to set his staff in;" and having.obtained a loan of money there, and taken a part in the festivities then going
on in the town, he formed an acquaintance with one Humphrey King, " King
of the Tobacconists," the author of a poem entitled "An Halfe-penny-worth
- of Wit in a Penny-worth of Paper, or The Hermit's Tale," to whom Nash
dedicated his work, and as a return for all favours granted, writes, "Because
I had money lent me at Yarmouth, I pay them again in praise of their own
town and the Red-Herring-to be seen when I am dead and under ground."
Yet it is to be remembered that, though inspired with new life and energy
when at Yarmouth in 1598, Nash had not long to live. His "Lenten Stuff"
was published in 1599, 4to, in the tlack letter, containing 83 pages, including
the Title, EpistleDedicatory, and Address, of which there is a very fine copy
in the British Museum, " Press mark" 1029. e, 21.
THOMAS NASH, "an author by profession"-the creature of genius, of
famine, and despair-the friend and boon companion of Robert Greene, Kit
Marlowe, Peele, Lodge, and that clique, the former of whom had been the
first to attack Shakespeare on the score of his little country grammar; his
education at a country grammar-school; and charged him with plucking the
feathers from the wing of Learning for the purpose of beautifying himself"for there is an upstart crow supposes he is as well able to bombast out a
blank-verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum,
is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in a country."*
THOMAS NASH-he who descended from the Nashes in Hertfordshire, and
received his education at St. John's, Cambridge, at which College he informs
us, " I once took up my inn, for seven years together lacking a quarter, and
yet love it still; for it is, and ever was the sweetest nurse of knowledge in all
that University"-was one of the most satirical writers in the age of Elizabeth
and hath proclaimed himself to the world as Pierce Penniless, and on a
retrospect of his literary life observes, that he had "set up late and rose early,
contended with the cold, and conversed with scarcity:" he says, "all my
labours turned to loss-I was despised and neglected, my pains not regarded,
or slightly rewarded, and I myself, in prime of my best wit, laid open to
poverty.  Whereupon I accused my fortune, railed on my patrons, bit my
pen, rent my papers and raged. How many base men that wanted those parts
I had, enjoyed content at will, and had wealth at command! I called to mind
a cobbler that was worth five hundred pounds; anhostlerthat had built a goodly,~
Greene's Groatsworth of Wit; 'Bought with a Million of Repentance, 1592.




ii


INTRODUCTION.


inn; a carman in a leather pilch that had whipt a thousand pounds out of his
horse's tail-and have I more than these? thought I to myself; am I better
brought up? yea, and better favoured? and yet am I a beggar? How am I
crost, or whence is this curse? Even from hence, the men that shall employ
such as I am, enamoured of their wits, though they be never so scurvy; that a
scrivener is better paid than a scholar, and men of art must seek to live among
cormorants, or be kept under by dunces, who count it policy to keep them bare
to follow their books the better."
Such was the miserable cry of an "author by profession" in the reign of
Elizabeth. Nash not only renounces his country in despair, and hesitates on
"the faulty means" which have appeased the pangs of many of his unhappy
brothers, but he proves also the weakness of the moral principle among these
men of genius; for he promises, " If any Maecenas bind me to him by his
bounty, or extend some round liberality to me worth the speaking of, I will do
him as much honour as any poet of my beardless years shall in England; but,"
he adds, " if I be sent away with a flea in my ear, let him look that I will
rail on him soundly; not for an hour or a day, while the injury is fresh in my
memory, but in some elaborate polished poem, which I will leave to the
world when I am dead, to be a living image to times to come of this beggarly
parsimony."  He made his supplication to the Devil because he had not then
found his Patron Saint.  At page 90 he has found his man.  He calls him
" one of the bright stars of nobility, and glistering attendants on the true
Diana." He is also "the matchless image of honour, and magnificent rewarder
of virtue; Jove's eagle-born Ganymede; thrice noble Amyntas;" This
description fits no one so perfectly as it does the young Earl of Southampton.
It sets before us the very image of youth, which Shakespeare calls "more
lovely than Adonis." We know that Nash was under the patronage of
Shakespeare's friend.  In the year 1594 he dedicated his work, The Unfor.
tunate Traveller; or, the Life Jack Wilton, to the Earl of Southampton, with
a reference to the difference betwixt it and earlier writings and this work; so
that there is no doubt of " Pierce Penniless " being inscribed to the Earl of
Southampton in person, if not by name, or that Nash's was the " alien pen "
that had followed Shakespeare in writing privately to the Earl.
At the close of Nash's university career, about 1587, he went up to
London, where he joined Greene, who had also been educated at St. John's
College, and after spending a few years in visiting the Continent, and moving
about from place to place without any settled employment, he at length took
up his abode in London as a literary adventurer.  His pugnacious propensity
hurried him at once into the contest with the Puritans in the Martin
Mar-Prelate controversy.  He attacked them  with their own favourite
weapons of ridicule and invective, and proved more than a match for them.
An Almond for a Parrot, or Cutbert Curry-Knaves Almes;     Martin's
Month's Mind; A Countereuff given to Martin Junior, &c., following each
other in rapid succession, overwhelmed his opponents with a shower of
humourous sallies and cutting jibes.  Such a clever satirist could scarcely fail
to attract notice. Accordingly he soon became a reigning wit at supper-tables,
and a choice boon companion among literary men of pleasure.
"The materials for Nash's biography are scanty, and the few details
furnished from different sources involve contradiction.  He was a native of
Lowestoft, in Suffolk, where he was born 1567. The latter portion of his
life was passed in profligacy and distress, and a considerable portion of it in
the gaols of the metropolis. Like Greene, he became penitent towards the end,
and in a pamphlet, entitled Christ's Ybars over Jerusalem, expressed contrition for his writings and his conduct to Dr. Gabriel Harvey and others,
The cause of his death, about 1600, is unknown.




NASHE'S LENTEN STUFFE:
Containing The Description and first Procreation
and Increase of the Towne of Great Yarmouth,
in Norffolke: With a new Play,
never played before of the
Praise of the Red-Herring.
Fitte of all Clearks of Noblemen's Kitchins to be read;
and not unnecessary by
all serving-men, that
have short BoordeWages, to be
remembered.
Famam peto per undas.
LONDON:
Printed for N. L. and C. B., and are to be
Sold at the West End of Paule's.
I 599.




I




To   his worthy, good       patron, Lusty      Humphrey,1
according     as   the   townsmen      do   christen    him;
Little   Numps, as the       nobility   ann    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 Tabor (as his
patient livery attendant can witness)
his bounden orator, T. N. most
prostrately offer up this
tribute of ink and
paper.
B  OST      courteous,   unlearned     lover  of poetry,
and   yet a    poet thyself, of no      less price
than    H.   S.   that,  in   honour    of   Maidmarian,2   gives   sweet marjoram        for his   empress,
and puts the sows most saucily upon some great
1LUSTY HUMPHREY.-Humphrey King, a poetical writer, of whom
little or nothing more is known than what may be gleaned from Nash's dedication. His choice poem of " An Halfe-penny-worth of Wit, in a Penny-worth
of Paper; or, The Hermite's Tale," occurred in Doctor Farmer's collection, and was purchased for the late Duke of Roxburghe.
sMAID-MARIAN.-A popular character in the old morris dance, which was
often a man in female clothes, and occasionally a strumpet. Hence the term
was sometimes applied with no very flattering intention,
3Sow.-A head,




xii


The Epistle


personage, whatever she be, bidding her (as it
runs in the old song)
Go from my garden, go,
For there no flowers for thee do grow.
These be to notify to your diminutive excellence,
and compendious greatness, what my zeal is towards
you, that in no streighter bonds would be pounded
and inlisted, than in an epistle dedicatory. Too
many more lusty blood Bravemente Signiors, with
Cadiz beards, as broad as sculler's maples, that
they make clean their boots with, could I have
turned it over, and had nothing for my labour,
some fair words excepting; 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 requite
you. In the meantime, my sword is at your
command; and (before God) money so scatteringly
runs here and there upon Utensilia, furnitures,
ancients, and other necessary preparations (and,
which is a double charge, look how much tobacco
we carry with us to expel cold, the like quantity
of staves aker1 we must provide us of to kill lice in
1STAVES AKEL- A species of larkspur, a native of the south of Europe,
and other warm countries. The seeds were formerly imported for medical
uses. They were particularly in repute for destroying vermin in the head."c Staves-aker I that's good to kill vermin, then belike if I serve you I shall be
lousy."-Marlowe's Dr. Fawus,




Dedicatory.


xi..
Xlii


that rugged country of rebels) that I say unto you in
the words of a Martialist, We cannot do as we
would. I am no incredulous Didymeus, but have
more faith to believe they have no coin, than they
have means to supply themselves with it, and so
leave   them.      To   any    other   carpet-monger,     or
Primrose Knight of Primero,1 bring I a dedication;
if the dice over night have not befriended him, he
sleeps five days and five nights to new-skin his
beauty, and will not be known he is awake till his
men, upon their own bonds (a dismal world for
trenchermen, when their masters bonds shall not be
so good as theirs) have took up commodities,2 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 the
barber to depure, decurtate, and sponge him, whom
having not paid a twelve-month before, he now
rains down eight quarter angels into his hand,
to make his liberality seem greater, and gives
PRIMERO.-A game at cards, said by some writers to be one of the oldest
known in England.-" I never prosper'd since I foreswore myself at Primero."
-" And left him at Primero with the Duke of Suffolk."-Shakespeare. In
the Marquis of Worcester's Centuary of Inventions-No. 89-is " White silk
knotted in the fingers of a pair of white gloves, and so contrived without
suspicion, that playing at Primero at cards, one may without clogging his
memory keep reckoning of all sixes, sevens, and aces which he hath discarded."
"COMMODITIES.-Wares taken in payment by needy persons who borrow
money of usurers; Interest. DROPPINGS OF THE MINT-OR " Mint Sauce;"
money.




xiv


The Epistle


him a cast riding jerkin, and an old Spanish hat into
the bargain, and God's peace be with him.  The
chamber is not rid of the smell of his feet, but the
greasy shoemaker with his squirrel's skin, and a
whole stall of ware upon his arm, enters, and
wrencheth his legs for an hour together, and after
shews his tally.  By S. Loy that draws deep, and
by that time his tobacco merchant is made even
with, and he hath dined at a tavern, and slept his
under-meal at a bawdy-house, his purse is on the
heild,1 and only forty shillings he hath behind
to try his fortune with at the cards in the presense[chamber]; which if it prosper, the court cannot contain him, but to London again he will, to revel it and
have 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
be spread upon the board, and all its trunks -opened
to show its rich suits, but the devil 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 be excluded out of Christian
burial,'and, instead of wreaths of laurel to crown it


'HEILD.-Decrease; wane.




Dedicatory.


XV


with, have a bell with a cock's comb clapped on the
crown of it by old 7ohannes de Indagines, and his
choir of Dorbellists.  Wherefore, the premises
considered (I pray you consider of that word
Premises, for somewhere I have 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 have 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 to the twinkling of
an eye, than in an whole year thou gettest by some
grasierly gentility thou followest. A king thou art
by name1 and a king of good-fellowship by nature,
whereby I ominate this encomium of the King of
Fishes was predestinated to thee from thy swaddling clothes. Hug it, ingle it, kiss it, and cull it
now thou hast it, and renounce eating of green beef
and garlick till Martlemas, if it be not the next style
to "The Strife of Love in a Dream:" or, "The
lamentable Burning of Tiverton." Give me good
words, I beseech thee, though thou givest me nothing
else, and thy words shall stand for thy deeds, which


1A KING THOU ART BY NAME.-See Note I page xi.




xvI


The Epistle Dedicatory.


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's an end, no other detriments will I put you to.
Let the can of strong ale [be] your constable, with the
toast [for] his brown bill1 and sugar and nutmegs his
watchmen, stand in a readiness to entertain me every
time I come by your lodging. In Russia there are
no presents but of meat or drink; I present you
with meat, and you, in honourable courtesy to
requite me, can do no less than present me with the
best morning's draught of merry-go-down2 in your
quarters; and so I kiss the shadow of your feets
shadow, amiable donsel,3 expecting your sacred
poem of "The Hermit's Tale," that will restore the
golden age amongst us, and so, upon my soul's
knees, I take my leave.
Yours, for a whole Last4 of Red-Herrings,
TH. NASH.
TBROWN-BILL.-A brown bill was a kind of battle-axe or halbert, affixed
to a long staff, and used by the English soldiery, and also by constables:
"Which is the constable's house?
At the sign of the Browvn-Bill."
Middleton's, Blurt, Master Constable, or the
Spaniard's Nighte-Walke, I602.
'MERRY-GO-DOWN. -An old cant term for strong ale, or huff-cap.
3DoNSEL.-A youth of good birth but not knighted.
'LAST OF HlERRINOS.-Ten thousand.-(IS71.)




To his Readers, he cares not what they be.


ASH'S          Lenten     Stuff!     And why Nash's
Lenten       Stuff?    Some     scabbed      scalled
Esquire replies: Because I had money lent
me at Yarmouth; and I pay them again in praise
of their own town and the red-herring. And, if it
were so, Goodman Pigwiggen, were not that honest
dealing? Pay thou all thy debts so, if thou canst
for thy life. But thou art a ninny-hammer, that is
not it; therefore, Nickneacave, I call it Nash's
Lenten Stuff, as well for that it was most of my
study the last Lent as that we use so to term any
fish that takes salt, of which the red-herring is one
of the aptest.! but, saith another John Dringle,
there is a book of the       Red-Herring's Tail,l printed
four terms since, that made this stale. Let it be a
1RED-HERRING's TAIL.-A   Herring's Tayle: contayning a poeticall
Fiction of diuers Matters worthie the Reading. London. For Matthew
Lownes, 1598, 4to. This Fiction appears to allude to some dispute between
two eminent personages of the time of Queen Elizabeth. Allusions are made
to the writings of Spencer and Sydney. There is a very fine copy of this
scarce poem in the British Museum, the "Press Mark" to which is 1077. b.
46. See Fry, Biblio. Memo. pp. 156 to 162.




xviii


To the Reader.


tail of haberdine,1 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 have 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 TrimTram,2 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 quartan,3 Busiris, or Phalaris,
wherein I follow the trace of the famousest scholars
of all ages, whom a wantonizing humour once in
their life-time hath possessed to play with straws,
and turn mole-hills into mountains.
Every man can say "Bee to a battledore," and
write 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,
that is "Pierce a God's 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
vein to be Tragicus Orator, and, of all styles, I most
'IIABERDINE.-Salted cod.
9TRIM-TRAM.-A trifle, or absurdity.
8FEVER QUARTAN.-a fourth day ague.




To the Reader.


XIX


affect and strive to imitate Aretine's,           not caring for
this demure, soft mediocre genus, that is like water
and wine mixed together; but give me pure wine of
itself, and that begets good blood, and heats the
brain thoroughly. I had as live have no sun, as have
it shine    faintly;    no   fire, as a     smothering      fire  of
small coals; no clothes, rather than wear
linsey-woolsey. Apply it for me, for I
am called away to correct the
faults of the press, that
escaped in my absence
from the printinghouse.
1To IMITATE ARETINE'S.-Nash was a great favourite with the wits of
his day. Dr. Lodge, in his "Wits' Miserie," calls him "our true English
Aretine." By another contemporary he is designated " Sweet satyric Nash."
A third describes his Muse as "armed with a gag-tooth (a tusk), and his pen
possessed with Hercules's furies." He is well characterised in " The Return
from Parnassus""His style was witty, tho' he had some gall;
Something he might have mended, so may all;
Yet this I say, that for a mother's wit,
Few men have ever seen the like of it."




iiI
I




The Praise of the Red-Herring.


HE        strange    turning    of the    "Isle of     Dogs,"'
from a comedy to a tragedy two summers
past, with the troublesome stir, which happened
about it, is a general rumour, that hath filled all
'ISLE OF DOGS.-A satirical play written by Nash in 1597, which gave so
much offence that Henslow's company, by whom it was acted, was silenced for
a time, and the author, after having been brought before the Privy Council,
was imprisoned in the Fleet. This comedy was never published, nor is any
manuscript copy of it known to be extant. What the nature of the piece was,
has not been discovered, but the consequences of having written it would seem
to have been very serious to its satiric author. Meres, in his " Comparative
Discourse of our English Poets, with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets,"
says, " Actseon was worried of his own hounds, so is Tom Nash of his Isle of
Dogs. Dogs were the death of Euripides, but be not disconsolate, gallant young
Juvenal; Linus, the son of Apollo, died the same death. Yet God forbid that
so brave a wit should so bravely perish; thine are but paper-dogs, neither is
thy banishment like Ovid's eternally to converse with barbarous Getes.
Therefore, comfit thyself, sweet Tom, with Cicero's glorious return to Rome,
and with the counsel NEneas gives to his sea-beaten soldiers, Lib. i, 2Eneid.
"Pluck up thine heart, and drive from thence,
both fear and care away;
To think on this, may pleasure be
prehaps another day."
"Durato, et tenet rebus servato secundis."
Palladis Tania,, or Wit's Treasury, 1598.




NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


England, and such a heavy cross laid upon ome, as
had well near confounded me; I mean, not so much
in that it sequestered mne from the wonted means of
maintenance, which is as great a maim to any man's
happiness, as can be 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 miller's thumb, or contemptible stickle-back of my enemies,' is as busy
nibbling about my fame, as if I were a dead man
thrown amongst them to feed them. So I am, I
confess, in the world's outward appearance, though
perhaps I may prove a cunninger diver than they
are aware; 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, or a
*Quwsa tamen piteous pickle every   one.*    But   let  that   pass,
nostra e8t, non
nais10     though they shall find     I will not let it pass, when
time serves, I having a pamphlet hot a brooding,
that shall be called "The Barber's Warming-pan,"and
2MY ENEMIES.-Nash had many adversaries: the most powerful of
whom was Gabriel Harvey, b. 1545, d. 1630.-A man of great learning and
considerable talents. During the time of Nash's imprisonment he published in
the name of Richard Lichfield a work in 4to entitled "The Trimming of
Thomas Nash, Gentleman, by the high-tituled patron Don Richardo de Medico
campo, Barber Chirurgeon to Trinity Colledge in Cambridge. Faber quas
fecit compedes ipse gestat. London, printed for Philip Scarlet, 1597. On
signature E 2 is a wood-cut of Nash double-fettered.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


3


to the occasion a fresh of my falling in alliance with
this Lenten argument. That unfortunate imperfect
embryo* of my idle hours, the "Isle of Dogs" before e"            oInyefe
such  b e  to    in well call it, for, I
mentioned, breeding       unto   me such    bitter throes      ain g beguinbut
the introduction
the teaming, as it did, and the       tempests, that arose nfiOst act h it....  *       acts without my
at its birth, so   astonishing, outrageous, and violent, consent, or th
least guess of my
as   if  my   brain   had   been   conceived     of  another adft oay prope b,supplied, which
Hercules;     I was so terrified with     my own increase bped, boh heir
trouble and mine,
(like a woman long travailing         to be delivered of a te.See footmonster) that it was no sooner born, but I was glad
to run from it. Too inconsiderate headlong rashness
this may be censured in me, in being thus prodigal
in advantaging my adversaries; but my case is now
smothered secret, and, with light cost of rough cast
rhetorick, it may      be  tolerably    plaistered   over, if
under the pardon and privilege of incensed higher
powers    it  were   lawfully    indulged    me    freely   to
advocate my      own   astrology.     Sufficeth  what they
in their grave wisdoms shall prescribe, I, in no sort,
will seek to acquit, nor presumptuously attempt to
dispute against the equity of their judgments, but
humble and prostrate appeal to their mercies.
Dr. Farmer remarks, that this is not Nash's only quarrel with the actors.
In the "Epistle to the Gentlemen Students of both Universities" prefixed to
Green's Arcadia, 1589, Tom has a lash at some " vain-glorious tragedians" and
very plainly at Shakespeare in particular: but Mr. Gilchrist more accurately
observes, that Nash's letter alludes to Kydd's old play of Hamlet; and was
published in 1589, 4to, some years before Shakespeare appeared as a writer for
hs stag e




4


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


Avoid or give ground I did, scriptzum est, I will not
go   from   it, and post varios casus, variable             knighterrant adventures, and outroads, and inroads, in great
Yarmouth in Norfolk, I arrived at the latter end of
autumn.       Where having scarce looked about me,
my presaging mind said to itself Hic favonius
serenus est, hic auster umbricus, this is a predestinated fit place for Pierce Penniless' to set up his
staff    in.     Therein      not   much      diameter      to   my
divining hopes, did the event sort itself, for six
weeks first and last; under that predominant constellation of Aquarius, or Jove's nectar-filler, took
I up my repose, and there met with such kind
entertainment, and benign hospitality, when I was
*Medieu.   Una litera plusquam         medicus*, as Plautus saith, and
1PIERCE PENNILESS.-Nash's most popular work, the title page of which
runs thus:   PIERCE  PENILESSE HIS SUPPLICATION TO THE DEUILL.
Describing the ouer-spreading of Vice, and the Suppression of Vertue.
Pleasantly interlac'd with variable delights: and pathetically intermixt with
conceipted reproofes.  Written by THOMAS NASH, Gentleman. London,
Imprinted by RICHARD IHONES, dwelling at the Signe of the Rose and
Cromne, nere Holburne Bridge. 1592.-The work afterwards "passed
through the pikes of at least six impressions," as he informs us in " Have with
you to Saffron Walden, or Gabriel Harvey's Hunt is up." London. J. Danter,
1596, 4to.-a tract that gave the finishing stroke to Gabriel Harvey. Besides
this, "Dick Litchfield, the barber of Trinity College, a rare ingenuous odd
merry Greek (as I have heard), hath translated my Pierce Penniless into the
Macaronical language, wherein I wish he had been more tongue-tied; since in
some men's incensed judgments, it hath too much tongue already; being above
two years since maimedly translated into the French tongue. "-Pierce Penniless
is reprinted with an Introduction and Notes by J. Payne Collier, Esq., F. S.A.,
for the Shakespeare Society, 1842.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


5


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 be seen when I am dead and under
ground1; 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 bason (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 know well, came a begging to one of the
chief cities of Greece, and promised them vast corpulent volumes of immortality, if they would bestow
upon him but a slender out-brother's annuity of
mutton and broth, and pallet to sleep on; and, with
derision, they rejected him; whereupon he went to
their enemies, with the like proffer, who used him
honourably, and whom he used so honourably, that
to this day (though it be three thousand years since),
their name and glory flourish green in men's memory
through his industry. I trust you make no question
but those dull-pated pennifathers, that in such
dudgeon scorn rejected him, drunk deep of the sour
cup of repentance for it, when the high flight of his
lines in common brute was applauded. Yea in the
'Nash died 1601-2, or about two years after the publication of this
work,




6


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


word of one no more wealthy, than he was (wealthy
said I, nay I will be sworn, he was a grand juryman,
in respect of me) those grey beard huddled-duddles,
and crusty cum-twangs, were struck with such
stinging remorse of their miserable euclionism and
sundgery, that he was not yet cold in his grave, but
they challenged him to be born amongst them, and
they, and six cities more, entered a sharp war about
it, every one of them laying claim to him as their
own: and to this effect hath Buchanan an epigram:
Urbes certarunt septem de patria Homeri,
Nulla, domus vivo patria nullafuit.
Seven cities strove, whence Homer first should
come,
When living, he no country had nor home.
I allege this tale to show how much better my
luck was than Homer's (though all the Kings of
Spain's Indies will not create me such a niggling
hexameter-founder, as he was) in the first proclaiming
of my bankrupt indigence and beggary, to bend my
course to such a courteous compassionate clime as
Yarmouth; and to warn others that advance their
heads above all others, and have not respected, but
rather flatly opposed themselves against the friar
mendicants of our profession, what their amercements,
and unreprieveable penance, will be, except they tear




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


7


open their oyster-mouthed pouches quickly, and
made double amends for their parsimony. I am no
Tiresias or Calchas to prophesy, but yet I cannot tell,
there may be more resounding bell-metal in my pen,
than I am aware; and, if there be, the first peel of it
is Yarmouth's; for a pattern or tiny sample, what
my elaborate performance would be in this case, had
I a full-sailed gale of prosperty to encourage me;
whereas, at the dishumoured composing hereof, I may
justly complain with Ovid:
Anchora jam nostram non tenet ulla ratem.
My state is so tossed and weather-beaten, that it
hath now no anchor-hole left to cleave unto. I care
not, if, in a dim fair of landscape, I take the pains to
describe this supereminent principal metropolis of
the red fish. A town it is, that, in rich situation
exceedeth many cities, and without the which, Caput
genlis, the swelling battlements of Gurguntus, a head
city of Norfolk and Suffolk, would scarcely retain the
name of city, but become as ruinous and desolate as
Thetford or Ely, out of an hill or heap of sand,
reared and forced from the sea most miracuously, and
by the singular policy and incessant inestimable
expence of the inhabitants, so firmly piled and
rampired against the furnish waves battery, or suing
the least action of recovery, that it is more conjectural
of the twain, the land, with the writ of an Ejectio




8


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


firma, will get the upper hand of the ocean, than the
ocean one crow's skip prevail against the continent.
Forth of the sands, thus strugglingly as it exalteth
and lifts up its glittering head: so of the neighbouring sands, no less semblably (whether, in
recordation of their worn out affinity, or no, I know
not) it is so inamorately protected and patronised,
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-faced queen of shades,
maugre letting drive upon their barricadoes, or
impetuously contending to break through their chain
or bar, but they intomb and balist' with sudden
destruction. In this transcursive reportory, without
some observant glance, I may not overpass the
gallant beauty of their haven, which having but as it
were a welt of land, or as Mr. Camden2 calls it
lingulam terrca, a little tongue of the earth, betwixt
it and the wide main, sticks not to manage arms,
and hold its own undefeasably against that universal
unbounded empire of surges, and so hath done for
these hundred   years.   Two miles in length it
stretches its winding current, and then meets with
a spacious river or back-water, that feeds it. A
'BALIsT.-An ancient engine, or kind of ordnance for projecting stones.
'Nash borrowed-as he candidly avows-much of the Historical portion of
his "Lenten Stuff" from Camden, Bede, &c,




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


9


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
hundred reasonable barks and vessels of good
burthen, with advantage, it hath given shelter to, at
once, in her harbour, and most of them riding
abreast before the quay betwixt the bridge and the
south-gate. Many bows length beyond the mark,
my pen roves not, I am certain; if I do, they stand
at my elbow that can correct me. The delectablest
lusty sight and movingest object methought it was,
that our Isle sets forth, and nothing behind in
number with the Invincible Spanish Armada, though
they were such Gargantuan boisterous gulliguts1 as
they; though ships and galleasses2 they would have
been reckoned in the navy of King Edgar, who is
chronicled and registered, with three thousand ships
of war, to have scoured the narrow seas, and sailed
about England   every summer.    That   which
especially nourished the most prime pleasure in me,
was after a storm, when we were driven in swarms,
and lay close pestered together as thick as they
could pack; the next day following, if it were fair,
they would cloud the whole sky with canvas, by
spreading their drabbled sails in the full clue abroad
a drying, and make a braver shew with them, than
IGULLIGUTS.-Gluttons.
'GALLEASSES.-A large kind of galley.




I0


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


so many banners and streamers displayed against
the sun, on a mountain top. But how Yarmouth, of
itself so innumerably populous and replenished, and in
so barren a spot seated, should not only supply her
inhabitants with plentiful purveyance of sustenance,
but provide and victual moreover this monstrous
army of strangers, was a matter that egregiously
puzzled and intranced my apprehension.   Hollanders, Zealanders, Scots, French, Western-men
Northern-men, besides all the hundreds, and wapentakes, nine miles distance, fetch the best of their
viands and mangery from her market.   For ten
weeks together, this rabble-rout of outlandishers are
billetted 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
weeks end, when the camp is broken up, no impression of any dearth left, but rather more store
than before.  Some of the town dwellers have so
large an opinion of their settled provision, that if all
her Majesty's fleet at once should put into their bay,
within twelve days 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 trumpeting and concelebrating the
royal magnificence of her government, that for state
and strict civil ordering, scarcely admitteth any rivals.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


I I


But I fear it would be a theme displeasing to the
grave modesty of the dircreet present magistrates;
and therefore consultively 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 the swaddling clouts or infancy; and reveal
to you when and by whom she was first forced out
of ocean's arms, and started up and aspired to such
starry sublimity; as also acquaint you with the
notable immunities, franchises, and privileges she is
endowed with, beyond all her confiners, by the
descending line of Kings from the Conquest.
There are of you, it may be, that will account
me a palterer for hanging out the sign of the RedHerring in my title page, and no such feast towards,
for ought you can see. Soft and fair, my masters;
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 shew you the length and
breadth of it.
The masters and bachelors commencement
dinners, at Cambridge and Oxford, are betwixt three
and four in the afternoon, and the rest of the
antecedence of the day worn out in disputations.
Imagine this the act or commencement of the




NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


1 2


Red-Herring, that proceedeth bachelor, master, and
doctor, all at once; and 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, and where so much fish
is sold, in the days of yore hath been the place
where you might have catched fish, and as plain a
sea, within these six hundred years, as any boat
could tumble in; and so was the whole level of the
marshes betwixt it and Norwich.  Anno Domini
iooo1000, or thereabouts (as I have scraped out of
worm-eaten parchment) and in the reign of Canutus,
he that died drunk at Lambeth, or Lome-hith, somewhat before, or somewhat after, not an apprenticeship
of years varying,
-  Capul extli 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 ninetyeight, that wants but a pair of years to make me a
true man) they would no more live under the yoke
of the sea, or have their heads washed with his
bubbly spume, or barber's balderdash, but clearly
quitted, disterminated, and relegated themselves
from his inflated capriciousness of playing the dictator over them.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


I3


The northern wind was the clanging trumpeter,
who, with the terrible blast of his throat, in one
yellow heap, or plump-clustered, or congested them
together, even as the western gales in Holland, right
over-against them, have wrought unruly havock,
and thrashed and swept the sands so before them,
that they have choaked or clammed 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 into. Castor, two miles distant from this No
Yarmouth we treat of, is inscribed to be that Old
Yarmouth, whereof there are specialties 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 its entrance into the sea, by aged fishermen commonly termed Grub's Haven, though now it be
gravelled up, and the stream, or tide-gate, turned
another way.  But this is most warrantable, the
Alpha of all the Yarmouths it was, and not the
Omega correspondently, and, from her withered
root, they branch the high ascent of their genealogy.  Omnium   rerum  vicissiludo esi, one's
falling is another's rising; and so it fell out with
that ruined dorp, or hamlet, which, after it had
relapsed into the lord's 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 revelled here and there with




14


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


his battle-axe, on the bordering banks of the
decrepid overworn village now surnamed Gorlstone,
threw forth his anchor, and, with the assistance of
his spear instead of a pike-staff, leaped aground
like a sturdy brute, and his yeomen bold cast their
heels in their necks and frisked it after him; and
thence sprouted that obscene appellation of Sarding
Sands, with the draff of the carterly hoblobs thereabouts, concocted or digested for a scripture verity,
Nwhen the right Christendom of it is Cerdick Sands,
or Cerdick Shore, of Cerdicus so denominated, who
was the first May-lord, or Captain of Morris-dance,
that, on those imbenched shelves, stamped his footing
where cods and dog-fish swam not a warp of weeks
forerunning, and, till he had given the onset, they
baulked them as quicksands. By and bye, after his
jumping upon them, the Saxons, (for that Garianonum, or Yarmouth, that had given up the ghost,)
in those slimy plashy fields of Gorlstone trouled 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 overthwart brink or verge of the flood,
that writ all one style of Cerdick-Sands, they
dislodged, with bag and baggage, and there laid the
foundation of a third Yarmouth, Quam nullapotest
abolere vetustas, that I hope will hold up her head till
Doomsday. In this Yarmouth, as Mr. Camden




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


i5


saith there were seventy inhabitants, or householders, that paid scot and lot in the time of
Edward the Confessor; but a chronographical Latin
table, which they have hanging up in their Guildhall,
of their transmutations from their cradlehood,
infringeth this a little, and flatters her she is a great
deal younger, in a fair text hand, texting unto us,
how, in the sceptredom of Edward the Confessor,
the sands first began to grow into sight at low water,
and more shallow at the mouth of the river Hirus
or Ierus, whereupon it was dubbed Iernmouth, or
Yarmouth; and then there were two channels, one
on the north, another on the south, where through
the fishermen did wander and waver up to Norwich,
and divers part of Suffolk and Norfolk, all the fenny
Lerna betwixt, that, with reed, is so imbristled, being,
as I have forespoken, or spoken before, Madona,
Amphitrite, fluctuous demesnes, or fee-simple.
From the city of Norwich on the east part, it is
sixteen miles disjunct and dislocated; and, though
betwixt the sea and the salt flood it be interposed,
yet in no place about it can you dig six feet deep,
but you shall have a gushing spring of fresh or sweet
water for all uses, as apt and accommodated as St.
Winifred's well, or Tower-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




i6


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


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 Harold and William the
Conqueror, 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) hived thither about the selling of fish
and herring, from St. Michael to St. Martin, and
there built sutlers booths and tabernacles, to canopy
their heads in from the rheum of the heavens, or the
clouds dissolving cataracts. King William Rufus
having got the golden wreath about his head, one
Herbertus, bishop of the See of Norwich, hearing
of the gangs of good fellows that hurtled and
bustled thither, as thick as it had been to the shrine
of St. Thomas 'a Becket, or our lady of Walsingham, built a certain chapel there for the service of
God, and salvation of souls.
In the reign of King Henry the First, King
Stephen, King Henry Second, and Richard de
Cceur de Lion, the apostacy of the sands from the
yelping world was so great, that they joined themselves to the main land of Eastflege, and whole
tribes of males and females trotted, barged it thither,
to build and inhabit, which the said kings, whilst
they wielded their swords temporal, animadvertised




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


I 7


of, assigned a ruler or governer over them, that was
called the King's Provost; and that manner of
provostship or government remained in full force
and virtue of all their four throneships, alias a
hundred years, even till the inauguration of King
John, in whose days the forewritten of Bishop of
Norwich, seeing the numerous increase of souls of
both kinds, that there had framed their nests, and
meant not to forsake them till the soul-bell tolled
them thence, pulled down his chapel, and, what by
himself and the devout oblations and donatives of
the fishermen upon every return with their nets full,
re-edified and raised it to a church of that magnitude, as, under-minsters and cathedrals, very queasy;
it admits any, hail, fellow, well met; and the church
of St. Nicholas, he hallowed it, whence Yarmouth
road is nicknamed the road of St. Nicholas. King
John, to comply and keep consort with his ancestors,
in furthering of this new water-work, in the ninth
year of the ingirting his anointed brows with the
refulgent Ophir circle, and Anno, I209, set a fresh
gloss upon it, of the town or free borough of
Yarmouth, and furnished it with many substantial
privileges and liberties, to have and to hold the same
of him, and his race, for fifty-five pounds yearly.
In Anno I240, it perched up to be governed by
bailiffs, and, in a narrower limit than the forty years
under meal of the seven sleepers, it had so much




NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


tow, 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 spoiled 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 council, set a fine of a
thousand pounds on the Yarmouth men's heads for
that offence, which fine, in the tenth of his reign, he
dispensed with, and pardoned.
Edward the First, and Edward the Second
likewise, let them lack for no privileges, changing
it from a borough to a port town, and there setting
up a custom-house, with the appurtenances for the
loading and unloading of ships. Henry the Third,
in the fortieth of his reign, cheered 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 have a prison or jail in it. In the
swing of his trident he constituted two lord admirals
over the whole navy of England, which he disposed
in two parts; 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,




OR PRAISE OF THE RED.HERRING.


I9


commissionated one John Peerbrown, burgess of the
town of Yarmouth, and over the westein navy one
Sir Robert Laburnus, Knight.
But Peerbrown did not only hold his office, all
the time of that King, doing plausible service, but
was again re-admiralled by Edward the Third, and
so died; in the fourteenth of whose reign he met
with the French King's navy, being four-hundred
sails, near to the haven of Sluys, and there so sliced
and slashed them, and tore their planks to
mammocks,l and their lean guts to kites meat, that
their best mercy was fire and water, which hath no
mercy; and not a victualler or a drumbler of them
hanging in the wind aloof, but was rib-roasted, or
had some of his ribs crushed with their stone-darting
engines, no ordnance then being invented.  This
Edward the Third, of his propensive mind towards
them, united to Yarmouth Kirtley road, from it seven
miles vacant, and, sowing in the furrows that his
predecessors had entered, enhanced the price of
their privileges, and brought them not down one
barley kernel.
Richard the Second, upon a discord betwixt
Lowestoff and Yarmouth, after divers law-days, and
arbitrary mandates to the counties of Suffolk and
Norfolk, directed about it, in proper person, 1385,


1MAMMOCKS.-.Fragments.




20


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


came to Yarmouth, and, in his parliament the year
ensuing, confirmed unto it the liberties of Kirtley
road, (the only motive of all their contention).
Henry the Fifth, or the Fifth of the Henries that
ruled over us, abridged them not a mite 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 Eighth,
with his daughters Queen Mary, and our Chara
Deum sobo/es, Queen Elisabeth, have not withered
up their hands in signing and subscribing to their
requests; but our Virgin rectoress, most of all, hath
showered down her bounty upon them, granting
them greater grants than ever they had, besides by
matters of the clerk of the marketship, and many
other benevolences towards the reparation of their
port. This, and every town, hath its backwinters 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 backwinter, the
frost biting, the eclipse or shade, and sickness of
Yarmouth, was a great sickness or plague in it,
I348, 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 I330, which, like the imperfect works of
King's College in Cambridge, or Christ Church in




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


21


Oxford, have 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, of their
own purses they would have proceeded with it; but
now they have gone a nearer way to the wood, for
with wooden galleries in the church that they have,
and stairy degrees of seats in them, they make as
much room to sit and hear, as a new west-end would
have done.
The length and breadth of Yarmouth, I promised to shew, you have with you; but first look
wistly upon 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 hundred and fourscore
yards: They have sixteen towers upon them;
mounts underfonging and inflanking them, formerly
two, now three, which have their thundering tools,
to compel Diego Spaniard to duck, and strike the
wind-cholick into his paunch, if he prance too near
them, and will not veil to the Queen of England.
The compass, about the wall of this new mount is
five hundred feet, and in the measure of yards eight
score and seven: The breadth of the foundation
nine feet, the depth within ground eleven: The
height to the setting thereof, fifteen feet, and in
breadth at the setting of it, five feet three inches,
D




22


NASTH's LENTEN STUFF.


and the proterous stature of it, so embailing and
girdling in this mount, twenty feet and six inches.
Gates (to let in her friends, and shut out herenemies),
Yarmouth hath ten, lanes sevenscore: 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 St. Tooley's in Beckles-water, are ten
miles, and from Yarmouth to Hardlie-cross another
way, ten miles, and conclusively, from Yarmouth
to Weybridge in the narrow north-water, ten miles:
In all which fords, or meanders, none can attach,
arrest, distress, but their officers; and, if any drown
themselves in them, their coroners sit upon them.
I had a crochet in my head, here to have given
the reins to my pen, and run astray throughout all
the coast-towns of England; digging up their
dilapidations, and raking out of the dust-heap, or
charnel-house of tenebrous antiquity, the rottenest
relick of their monuments, and bright scoured the
canker-eaten brass of their first bricklayers and
founders, and commented and paralogized on their
coAdition in the present, and in the preter tense:
Not for any love or hatred I bear them, but that I
Wv6'uId o6t be snubbed, or have it cast in my dish,




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


23


that therefore I praise Yarmouth so rantingly,
because I never elsewhere baited my horse, or took
my bow and arrows, and went to bed.    Which
leesing, had I been let alone, I would have put to
bed with a Recurnben/iubts, by uttering the best that
with a safe conscience might be uttered of the best,
or worst, of them all; and notwithstanding all at
best, that tongue could speak, or heart could think
of them, they should bate me an ace of Yarmouth.
Much brain-tossing and breaking of my skull it cost
me; but farewell it, and farewell the bailiffs of the
Cinque-Ports, whose primordial Gelineliaca was also
dropping out of my inkhorn, with the silver oar of
their barony by William the Conqueror, conveyed
over to them at that nick, when he firmed and
rubricked Kentishmen's gravel-kind of the son to
inherit at fifteen, and the felony of the father not to
draw a foot of land from the son, and 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 tenure, and
might alienate it how they would, either by legacy
or bargain, without the consent of the lord.
To shun spight I smothered these dribblements, and 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 enfeoffed of Kent;




24


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


for which, to make it sure unto him, after he was
entailed thereunto, nought they asked they needed
to ask twice, it being enacted before the words came
out of their mouth. Of that profligated labour yet
my breast pants and labours, a whole mouth's mind
of revolving meditation I ravelling out therein (as
ravelling out signifies Penelopec telam retexere, the
unweaving of a web before woven and contexed.)
It pities me, it pities me, that in cutting of so fair a
diamond as Yarmouth, I have not a casket of dusky
Cornish diamonds by me, and a box of muddy foils
the better to set it forth: Ut nemo miser, nisi
comparatus, sic nihil pro mirifco, nisi cum aliis
conferatur: Cedite soli, stellce scintillantes; soli
Garrianano cedite, reliqua oppida veligera sedium
uavalium speciosissimo; sed redeo ad vernaculum.
All commonwealths assume their prenominations of their common divided wealth, as where one
man hath not too much riches, and another man too
much poverty: Such was Plato's community, and
Lycurgus's and the old Roman's laws of measuring
out their fields, their meads, their pastures and
houses, and meting out to every one his child's portion. To this commune bonum (or, every horse his
loaf) Yarmouth, in propinquity, is as the buckle to
the throng, and the next finger to the thumb; not
that it is sib, or cater-cousin to any mongrel
Democratia, in which one is all, and all are one, but




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


25


that, in her, as they are not all one, so one or two
there pocket not up all the pieces, there being twohundred in it worth three hundred pounds a piece,
with poundage and shillings to the lurched, set aside
the bailiff's four-and twenty and eight-and-forty.
Put out my eye who can with such another brag of
any sea-town within two hundred miles of it. But
this common good within itself is nothing to the
common good it communicates to the whole state.
Shall I particularize unto you quibus viis & modis,
how and wherein? There is my hand too, 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 their
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 than in ancient times.  All the realm it
profiteth many ways; as, by the free fair of
herrings, chiefly maintained by the fishermen of
Yarmouth themselves; by the great plenty of salted
fish there, not so little two years past, as fourhundred thousand; wherein were employed about
fourscore sail of barques of their own.
By the furnishing forth of forty boats for
mackerel at the spring of the year, when all
things are dearest, which is a great relief to all
the country thereabouts, and, soon after Bartholo



26


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


mew-tide, a hundred and twenty sail of their own
for herrings, and forty sail of other ships and
barques, trading to Newcastle, the Low Countries,
and   other voyages.      Norwich, at her Majesty's
coming in progress' thither, presented her with a
shew   of knitters, on a high stage placed for the
nonce; Yarmouth, if the like occasion were, could
clap up as good a shew of netbraiders, or, those
that have no clothes to wrap their hides in, or bread
to put in their mouths, but what they earn and get
by braiding of nets (not so little as two thousand
pounds 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 inhabitants in working them) and, for a commodious green place, near the sea-shore, to mend
and dry them, not Salisbury Plain or Newmarket
Heath (though they have no vicinity or neighbourhood with the sea, or scarce with any ditch or pond
of fresh water) may overpeer, or outcrow her, there
being above five thousand pounds worth of them at
a time upon her dens a sunning. A convenient quay
within her haven she hath, for the delivery of nets
'An account of this "progress" is given in a scarce tract entitled "The
joyfull recevying of the Queene's most excellent Majestie into hir Highness
citie of Norwich," &c. London, I578, and is reprinted in the second volume
of Nichol's valuable collection of the Progresses and Public Processions of
Queen Elizabeth, Lond. I788-I807, 4to, 3 vols.
2DEN.-A sandy tract near the sea.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


27


and herrings, where you may lie a-float at low water;
I beseech, you do not so in the Thames; many
serviceable mariners and seafaring men she traineth
up;-but of that in the Herring.
The marshes and lower grounds, lying upon
the three rivers that vagary up to her, comprehending many thousand acres, by the vigilant preservation
of their haven, are increased in value more than
half, which else would be a Meotis Palus, a mear,
or lake of eels, frogs, and wild ducks. The city of
Norwich, as in the Pracludium hereof I had a twitch
at, fares never the worse for her, nor would fare so
well, if it were not for the fish of all sorts that she
cloyeth her with, and the fellowship of their haven,
into which their three rivers 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
lose 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 Red-Herring. The
haven hath cost, in these last twenty-eight years,
twenty-six thousand two hundred fifty-six pounds,
four shillings, and five pence: fortification and
powder, since Anno I587, two thousand marks; the




28


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


sea service in Anno I588, eight hundred pounds;
the Portuguese voyage, a thousand pounds; the
voyage to Cadiz as much.
It hath lost by the Dunkirkers, a thousand
pounds; by the Frenchmen, three thousand; by
Wafting, eight hundred; by the Spaniards, and
other loses not rated, 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 pounds, and five pounds 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 have not, jin certain revenues, above fifty or
threescore pounds a year, and that is in houses.
The yearly charge towards the provision of fish for
her Majesty, one thousand 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 beggar's 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 Yarmouth, in winning the treasure
of fish out of those profundities, and then we should
have twenty eggs a penny; and, it would be as
plentiful a world as when abbies stood; and now, if
there be any plentiful world, it is in Yarmouth.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED- H ERRING.


29


Her sumptuous porches, and garnished buildings,
are such, as no port-town in our British circumference, nay, take some port-cities overplus into the
-bargain, may suitably stake with, or adequate.
By the proportion of the east-surprised Gades,
or Cadiz, divers have tried their cunning to configurate a twin-like image of it, both in the
correlative analogy of the span-broad rows running
betwixt, as also of the skirt, or lappet of earth,
whereon it stands, herein only limiting the difference,
that the houses here have not such flat custardcrowns at the top, as they have. But I, for my
part, cast it aside, as too obscure a canton to
demonstrate and take the altitude by of so Elysian
an habitation as Yarmouth. Of a bouncing, sidewasted parish in Lancashire we have a flying voice
dispersed, where they go nine miles to church every
Sunday; but, parish for parish, throughout Lancashire, Cheshire,  or  Wingandecoy, both for
numbers in gross of honest householders, youthful,
courageous, valiant spirits, and substantial, grave
burghers, Yarmouth shall drop vie with them, to the
last Edward's groat they are worth. I am posting
to my proposed scope, or else I could run ten quires
of paper out of breath, in further traversing her
rights and dignities.
But of that freight I must not take in too
liberally, in case I want stowage for my Red



30


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


Herring, which I rely upon as my wealthiest
loading.   Farewell, flourishing   Yarmouth, and be
every day more flourishing than other, until the
latter day; while I have my sense, or existence, I will
persist in loving thee, and so, with this abrupt postscript, I leave thee.     I have not travelled far,
though conferred with farthest travellers, from our
own realm; I have turned over venerable Bede, and
plenteous beadrolls of friary annals following on the
back of him; Polydore Virgil, Buchanan, Camden's
Britannia, and most records of friends, or enemies,
I have searched, as concerning the later model of it;
none of the inland parts of it, but I have traded them
as frequently as the middle walk in Paul's, or my
way to bed every night; yet for aught I have read,
heard, or seen, Yarmouth, regal Yarmouth, of all
maritime towns that are no more but fisher-towns,
solely reigneth, sans peer.
Not any where is the word severeliar practised,
the preacher reverentlier observed and honoured,
justice soundlier ministered, and a warlike people
peaceablier demeanoured, betwixt this and the
Grand Cathay,' and the strand of Prester John.2
TCATHAY.-An old name for China.
'PRESTER JOHN.-The name given in the middle ages to a supposed
Christian sovereign dwelling in the interior of Asia. The tradition disappeared
soon after the Portuguese had reached India by the way of the Cape of Good
Hope.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


3 I


Adieu, adieu, ten-thousand-fold delicate paramour of Neptune, the next year my standish may
happen to address another voyage unto thee, if
this have any acceptance. Now, it is high leaking
time, and, be the winds never so easterly adverse,
and the tide fled from us, we must violently tow,
and hale in our redoubtable sophy, of the floating
kingdom of Pisces, whom so much as by name I
should not have acknowledged, had it not been
that I mused, how Yarmouth should be invested in
such plenty and opulence; considering, that, in Mr.
Hakluyt's English Discoveries, I have not come in
ken of one mizzen-mast of a man of war bound for
the Indies, or Mediterranean stern-bearer sent from
her zenith or meridian.  Mercurial-breasted Mr.
Harborne always accepted a rich spark of eternity
first lighted and enkindled at Yarmouth, or there first
bred, and brought forth to see the light; who since,
in the hottest degrees of Leo, hath echoing noised
the name of our island, and of Yarmouth, so Tritonly,
that not an infant of the curtailed, skin-clipping
pagans, but talk of London as frequently, as of
their prophet's tomb of Mecca, and as much
worships or maiden-peace, 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 Sultan Pharaoh to let the children of




32


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


Israel go, so, from the prepotent goddess of the
earth, ELIZA, was he sent to set free the English
captives, and open unto us the passage into the Redsea and Euphrates.     How  impetrable he was in
* Theadamant mollifying the * adamantiest tyrany of mankind, and
mollified   with
nothing but hourly crucifier of Jesus Christ crucified, and rooter
blood.
up of Palestine; those that be scrutinous to pry into,
let them revolve the digests of our English discoveries, cited up in the precedents, and be
documentized most copiously. Of him, and none
but him, who in valuation is worth eighteen huge
argosies full of our present-dated misshapen childish
travailers, have I took, sent, or come in the wind of,
that ever Yarmouth unshelled or engendered, to
weather it on till they lost the north star, or sailed
just antipodes against us; nor, walking in the
streets so many weeks together, could I meet with
any of these swaggering captains (captains that
wore a whole ancient in a scarf, which made them
go heave-shouldered, it was so boisterous) or huftytufty1 youthful ruffling comrades, wearing every one
three yards of feather in his cap for his mistress's
favour, such as we stumble on at each second step
at Plymouth, Southampton, and Portsmouth; but,
a universal merchantly formality, in habit, speech,
HHUFTYTUFTY.-A swaggerer.-" Master Wyldgoose it is not your
huftie-tuqftie can make mee afraid of your bigge lookes. —Breton's Poste
with a Packet of Mad Lettdrs. I603.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


33


and gestures, though little merchandise they beat
their heads about, Queen Norwich for that going
between them and home; at length, (0, 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, and
he eftsoons1 defined unto me, that the Red-Herring
was this old ticklecob, or Magisterfac totum, that
brought in the red ruddocks2 and the grummel seed3
as thick as oatmeal, and made Yarmouth for argent
to put down the city of Argentine. Do but convert,
said he, the slenderest twinkling reflex of your eyesight to this flinty ring that ingirts it, these towered
walls, port-cullissed gates, and gorgeous architectures
that condecorate and adorn it, and then perponder of
the Red-Herring's priority and       prevalence, who is
the only inexhaustible mine that hath raised and
begot all this, and, minutely to riper maturity, fosters
and cherisheth it. The Red-Herring alone it is that
EFTSOONS.-Immediately.
'RED RUDDOCKS.-The English robin, or redbreast.
3GRUMMEL, OR GROMWEL SEED.-From a plant of the genus
lithospermtnm.
The altars everywhere now smoking be
With beanstalks, savine, laurel, rosemary,
Their cakes of grummell-seed they did prefer,
And pails of milk in sacrifice to her.
Then hymn of praise they all devoutly sung
In those Palilia for increase of young.
BJrowne's Britannia's Pastorals.




34


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


countervails the burthensome detriments of our
haven, which every twelvemonth devours a justice
of peace's living, in wiers and banks to beat off
the sand, and overthwart ledging and fencing it in;
that defrays all impositions and outward payments to
her Majesty (in which Yarmouth gives not the wall
to six, though sixteen moth-eaten burgess towns, that
have daubers and thatchers to their mayors, challenge, in parliament, the upper hand of it) and for
the vaward, or suburbs of my narration, that impails
our sage senators, or Ephori, in princely scarlet, as
pompous ostentive as the Vinti qzuaer, or Lady
Troynonant; wherefore, quoth he, if there be in
thee any whit of that unquenchable sacred fire of
Apollo, as all men repute, and that Minerva,
amongst the number of her heirs, hath adopted thee,
or thou wilt commend thy muse to sempiternity, and
have images and statues erected to her after her unstringed silent interment and obsequies, rouse thy
spirits out of this drowsy lethargy of melancholy they
are drenched in, and wrest them up to the most outstretched airy strain of elocution, to chaunt and
carol forth the allegrezza and excelsitude of this
monarchical floody IndZiperalor.
Very tractable to this lure I was trained, and
put him not to the full availing of me with any
sound hammering persuasion, in that at the first sight
of the top-gallant towers of and a week before he




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


35


had broken any of these words betwixt his teeth, my
muse was ardently inflamed to do it some right; and
praise of the Red-Herring, whose proper soil and
nursery it is. But this I must give you to wit, however I have took it upon me, that, never since I
spouted ink, was I of worse aptitude to go through
with such a mighty March brewage as you expect, or
temper you one right cup of that ancient wine of
Falernum, which would last forty year, or consecrate
to your fame a perpetual temple of the pine-trees of
Ida, which never rot. For, besides the loud bellowing prodigious flaw of indignation, stirred up against
me in my absence and extermination from the upper
region of our celestial regimen, which hath dug me
in a manner down to the infernal bottom of desolation, and so troubledly bemudded with grief and care
every cell or organ-pipe of my purer intellectual
faculties, that no more they consort with any ingenious playful merriments; of my note-books, and
all books else, here in the country, I am bereaved,
whereby I might enamel and hatch over this device
more artifically and masterly, and attire it in its true
orient varnish and tincture; wherefore, heart and
good-will, a workman is nothing without his tools;
had I my topicks by me instead of my learned
council to assist me, I might, perhaps, marshal my
terms in better array, and bestow such costly cookery
on this marine magnifico, as you would prefer him




36


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


how to bring it about fitter I knew not, than in the
before tart and galingale,1 which Chaucer preeminentest encomioniseth above all junquetries or
confectionaries whatsoever.
Now you must accept of it as the place serves,
and, instead of comfits and sugar to strew him with,
take well in worth a farthing-worth of flour, to
white him over and wamble him in, and I having no
great pieces to discharge for his benvenue,2 or welcoming in, with this volley of rhapsodies or small
shot, he must rest pacified; and so ad rem, spur, cut
through    thick   and thin,3 and enter the       triumphal
chariot of the Red-Herring.
Homer of rats and frogs hath heroicked it;
other oaten pipers after him, in praise of the gnat,
the flea, the hazel-nut, the grasshopper, the butterfly,
the parrot, the popinjay, philip-sparrow, and the
cuckoo; the wantoner sort of them sing descant on
their mistress's glove, her ring, her fan, her looking1GALINGALE. -The aromatic root of the rush cyperus, used as a drug, or
as a seasoning for dishes. There is an English species.
My spice box, gentleman,
And put in some of this, the matter's ended;
Dredge you a dish of plovers, there's the art on't;
Or in a galinqale, a little does it.
Beaumtont and IFletcher-Bloody Brother, ii, 2.
2 BENVENUE.-A fee paid by a new workman.
'THICK AND THIN. -Through thick and thin, both over bank and bush,
In hopes her to obtain by hook or crook.
Spencer's I airy Queen, Book iii, Canto I,




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


37


glass, her pantofle, and on the same jury, I might
impanel Johannes Secundus with his book of the
two hundred kinds of Kisses. Philosophers come
sneaking in with their paradoxes of poverty,
imprisonment, death, sickness, banishment, and
baldness; and as busy they are about the bee,
the stork, the constant turtle, the horse, the dog, the
'ape, the ass, the fox, and the ferret.      Physicians
deafen our ears with the honorificabilitudinitatibus
of their heavenly panacoea, their sovereign guiacum,
their clysters, their treacles, their mithridates, compacted of forty several poisons, their bitter rhubarb,
and torturing stibium.
The    posterior  Italian  and   German     cornugraphers stick not to applaud and canonize unnatural
sodomitry, the strumpet errant, the gout, the ague,
the dropsy, the sciatica, folly drunkenness, and slovenry. The Galli gallinacei, or cocking French,
swarm every pissing while in their primer editions,
imprimeda jour duy, of the unspeakable healthful
conducibleness of the Gomorriham great poco, a poco,
their true countryman every inch of him, the prescript laws of tennis or balonne1 (which is most of
1BALONNE, OR BALOON.-A large inflated ball of strong leather, formerly
used in a game called balloon, the ball being struck by the arm, which was
defended by a bracer of wood. The game is thus described in a book entitled
Country Contents:"A strong and moving sport in the open fields, with a great ball of double
E




38


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


their gentlemen's chief livelihoods) the commodity
of hoarsness, blear-eyes, scabbed-hams, thread-bare
cloaks, poached-eggs. and panado's. Amongst our
English harmonious Calenzio's, 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
white-meats, and justifies it under his hand to be
bought and sold everywhere, that they exceed nectar
and ambrosia: a fourth comes forth with something
in praise of nothing; a fifth, of an inflamed heal to
coppersmith's-hall, all to betimes it of the diversity of
red-noses, and the hierarchy of the nose magnifcat: a sixth sweeps behind the door all earthly
felicities, and makes baker's maulkins of them, if they
stand in competency with a strong dozen of points;
marry, they must be points of the matter, you must
leather filled with wind, and driven to and fro with the strength of a man's arm,
armed with a bracer of wood."
Strut, who quotes this description, adds that it was the same sport which
was revived not many years ago at Pimlico, under the title of the Olympic
Game, vol. iii, p. I48. That the balloon was filled with wind appears in this
quotation:"The more that ballones are blowen up with winde, the higher they
rebounde."
Defence of the Regiment of Women, Harl. MS., 6257.
Packe, foole to French baloone, and there at play
Consume the progresse of thy sullen day.
Robert Anton's Philosopher's Satyres, 1616, p. 20.
"While others have been at the balloon, I have been at my books."
Ben Jonson, Fox ii, 2.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


39


consider, whereof the foremost codpiece point is the
crane's proverb in painted clothes, "Fear God, and
obey the King;" and the rest, and some have tags,
and some have none: a seventh sets of tobacco-pipe
instead of a trumpet to his mouth, and of that divine
drug proclaimeth miracles: an eighth capers it up to
the spheres in commendation of dancing: a ninth
offers sacrifice to the goddess Cloaca, and disports
himself very scholarly and witty about the reformation of close-stools, and houses of office, and spicing
and balming their rank entrails, that they stink not.
A tenth set forth remedies of toasted turds against
famine.
To these I might wedge in Cornelius the
Brabantine, who was feloniously suspected, in 87,
for penning a * discourse of Tuft-mockados'; and a con^J,,,.toi,.
beforeMr. Samuel
country  gentleman    of my    acquaintance, who is DDanrie tTrae
lation of the Em-.
launching forth a treatise, as big garbed, as the prese of Paul.
who says, " there
French academy of the cornucopia of a cow, and whats notpusblshd a
iflorish upon fan.
an advantageable creature she is, beyond all the ye, or the sill
enterlude of Dio.
four-footed  rabblement of herbagers and       grass- gene8: you proj ocandi" or ' pochampers, day nor night, that she can rest for fillingtani": you discourse  not  of
and tampering about it; as also a sworn brother of" ptel    o
"Cornelius  the
his, that so bangeth poor paper, in laud of bag- rabantne, wo
published anm enpudding, as a Switzer would not believe it. Neither comion of Touftyou present us an
order to frame
devises, in shewu
glorious, informs
'TVFT-MOCKADO.-A mixed stuff, manufactured in imitation of tufted ptlaine  ttl
taffeta, or velvet.




40


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


of their decades are yet stamped, but, before
Midsummer term, they will be, if their words be sure
payment; and then tell me, if our English sconses
be not right Sheffield or no.
The application of this whole catalogue of waste
authors is no more but this, Quot capita tot sententice,
so many heads, so many whirligigs; and, if all these
have terlery-gincked it so frivolously, of, they know
not what, I may, (cum gratia and privilegio,) pronounce it, that the Red-Herring is wholesome in a
frosty morning, and rake up some few scattered
syllables together, in the polishing; excursions and
circumquaques, but totaliter appositum.
That English merchandise is most precious,
which no country can be without; if you ask
Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Sussex, or Leominster, or
Cotswold, what merchandise that should be, they
will answer you, it is the very same, which
Polydore  Virgil  calls, vere aureum  vellus, the
true golden fleece of our wool and English cloth,
and nought else: other engrating    upland cormorants will grunt out, it is grana paradisi, our
grain or corn that is most sought after. The
Westerners and Northerners, that it is lead, tin and
iron.  Butter and cheese, butter and cheese, saith
the farmer; but from every one of these I dissent,
and will stoutly abide by it, that, to trowl in cash
throughout all nations of Christendom, there is no




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


4I


fellow to the Red-Herring. The French, Spanish,
and Italian, have wool enough of their own, thereof
they make cloth to serve their turn, though it be
somewhat coarser than our's. For corn, none of the
east parts but what surpasseth us; of lead and tin is
the most scarity 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 have quadruple the store that we
have.  As touching butter and cheese, the Hollanders cry, by your leave we must go before you;
and the Transalpiners, with their lordly Parmesan
(so named of the city of Parma, in Italy, where it is
first clout-crushed and made) shoulder in for the
upper-hand as hotly: whereas, of our appropriate
glory of theRed-Herring, no region, betwixt the poles
artick and antartick, may, can, or will rebate from us
one scruple.
On no coast, like ours, is it caught in such abundance, no where dressed in his right cue but under
our horizon; hoisted, roasted, and toasted here alone
it is, and as well powdered and salted as any Dutchman would desire. If you articulate with me of the
gain or profit of it, without the which, the new fanglest rarity, that no body can boast of but ourselves,
after three days' gazing, is reversed over to children
for babies to play with: behold, it is every man's
money from the King to the courtier; every house



42


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


holder, or Goodman         Baltrop, that keeps a        family    in
pay, cast for it as one          of his standing      provisions.
The poorer sort make it three parts of their sustenance: with it, for his dinner, the patchedest leather
pilchel laboratho may dine like a Spanish Duke, when
the niggardly mouse of beef will cost him sixpence.
In the craft of catching, or taking and smudging it,
(merchant and chapmanable as it should be), it sets
a-work thousands, who lives all the rest of the year
gaily well, by what, in some few weeks they scratch
up then, and      come    to  bear office of questman2          and
'PiLCH, OR PILCHER.-An outer garment generally worn in cold
weather, and made of skins of fur; from pylche, a skin-coat, Saxon.  The
term is still retained in connected senses in our dialects.  A piece of flannel
or other woollen put under a child next the clout, is in Kent called a pilch;
a coarse shagged piece of rug laid over a saddle for ease of a rider, is in our
midland parts called a pilch.  In our old dramatists the term is applied to a
buff or leather jerkin, and Shakespeare has pilcher for the sheath of a
sword:< Will you pluck your sword out of his pilcher by the ears?"
Romeo and Juliet, iii, I.
Decker says of Ben Jonson:"Thou hast forgot how thou ambled'st in a leather pilch, by a playwaggon in the high-way."
Satiromastio.
'QUESTMAN, OR QUESTMONGER.-One who laid informations, and made
a trade of petty law suits.  In Clitus's Whimzies, the l6th section contains a
long character of a questman (page 122), which in fact was an old name for
a sides-man, or assistant to the churchwardens.  See Blount's "Glossographia," in the word Sideman.   He is described accordingly, with many
quaint strokes of humour:" A questman is a man of account for this yeere. He never goes without
his note-book.-He is a sworne man; which oath serves an injunction on his




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


43


scavenger in the parish where they       dwell; which
they could never have done, but would have begged
or starved, with their wives and brats, had not this
captain of the squamy cattle so stood their good
lord and master: carpenters, shipwrights, makers of
lines, ropes and cables, dressers of hemp, spinners of
thread, and net-weavers it gives their handfuls to,
sets up so many salthouses to make salt, and salt
upon salt; keeps in earnings the cooper, the brewer,
the baker, and numbers of other people, to gill, wash,
and pack it, and carry it and recarry it.
In exchange of it from other countries, they
return wine and woads', for which is always paid
ready gold, with salt, canvas, nitre, and a great
deal of good trash.      Her Majesty's tributes and
customs, this semper Augustus of the sea's finny
freeholders, augmenteth and enlargeth unaccountably,
and, to the increase of navigation, for her service,
he is no enemy.
Voyages of purchase or reprisals, which are
now grown a common traffick, swallow up and
consume more sailors and mariners than they breed,
conscience to be honest.-The day of his election is not more ready for him
than he for it." Pp. 122-3.
He was also a collector of parish rents:" Some treasure he hath under his hand, which he must returne; he can
convert very little to his own use, nor defeate the parish of any house rent."
P. 124.
'wOAD.-A plant formerly much used for giving a permanent blue dye,
but now superseded by indigo.




44


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


and lightly not a slop of a rope-hauler they send
forth to the Queen's ships, but he is first broken to
the sea in the herring-man's skiff or cock-boat,
where, having learned to brook all waters, and drink
as he can out of a tarry can, and eat poor John out
of smutty platters when he may get it, without
butter or mustard, there is no oh! with him, but, once
heartened thus, he will needs be a man of war, or a
tobacco-taker, and wear a silver whistle.  Some of
these, for their haughty climbing, come home with
wooden legs, and some with none, but leave body
and all behind; those, that escape to bring news, tell
of nothing but eating tallow and young blackamoors,
of five and five to a rat in every mess, and the shipboy to the tail; of stopping their noses when they
drunk stinking water that came out of the pump of
the ship, and cutting a greasy buff jerkin in tripes,
and broiling it for their dinners.  Divers Indian
adventures have been seasoned with direr mishaps,
not having, for eight days space, the quantity of a
candle's-end amongst eight score to grease their
lips with; and, landing in the end to seek food, by
the cannibal savages they have been circumvented,
and forced to yield their bodies to feed them.
Thatisfor a Our mitred archpatriarch, Leopold Herring,
mnan to be h own
executioner, and,
at his Prince's exacts no such* Muscovian vassalage of his liegemen,
the theroek though he put them to their trumps other times,
and thence throw
> fo, patge 2. and scuppets not his beneficence into their mouths




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


45


with such fresh water facility, as Mr. Ascham, in his
"Schoolmaster," would imply.  His words are these,
in his Censure upon Varro: " He enters not," saith
he, " into any great depth of eloquence, but, as one
carried in a small low vessel by himself very nigh
the common shore; not much unlike the fishermen
of Rye, or herring-men of Yarmouth, who deserve,
by common men's opinion, small commendation for
any cunning sailing at all."2 Well, he was her
Majesty's schoolmaster, and a St. John's man in
Cambridge, in which house once I took up my inn
for seven years together lacking a quarter, and yet
love it still, for it is, and ever was, the sweetest
nurse of knowledge in all that university. Therefore I will keep fair quarter with him, and expostulate the matter more tamely.   Memorandum non
ab uno, 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 coast he soundeth;
nor one man by himself alone, to do everything,
which is the opinion of one man, by himself alone,
'De LinguA LatinA et Analogiz.
" Yet nevertheless-adds Ascham-in those bookes of Varro, there is
good and necessarie stuffe for that meane kinde of argument, verie well and
learnedly gathered together."




46


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


and not believed of any other.  Five to one, if he
were alive, I would beat against him, (since one,
without five, is as good as none,) to govern the most
egg-shell shallop that floateth, and spread her nets,
and draw them in.  As stiffly could I controvert it
with him about pricking his card so badly in Cape
Norfolk, or Sinus Yarmoulhiensis, and discrediting
our countrymen for shore-creepers, like the Colchester oystermen, or whitingmongers and spratcatchers. Solyman Herring, I would you should
persuade yourselves, is loftier-minded, and keepeth
more aloof than so; and those that are his followers,
if they could seek him where he is, more than
common danger they must incur in close driving
under sands, which alternately, or betwixt times,
when he is disposed to ensconse himself, are his
intrenching rendezvous, or castle of retiring; and
otherwhile, forty or threescore leagues in the roaring
territory, they are glad, on their wooden horses, to
post after him, and scour it, with the Ethiopian
pitchboards, till they be windless in his quest and
pursuing.  Returning from waiting on him, have
with you to the Adriatick, and abroad every where
far and near, to make port-sail of their perfumed
smoky commodities, and, that toil rocked asleep,
they are for Ultima Thule, the North seas, or
Iceland, and thence yerk overt that worthy
Palamede Don Pedro de Linge, and his worshipful




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


47


nephew Hugo Haberdine, and a trundle-tail tike1 or
shark or two; and, towards Michaelmas, scud
home to catch herring again.  This argues they
should have some experience of navigation, and are
not such halcyons to build their nests all on the
shore, as Mr. Ascham supposeth.
Rye is one of the most 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 into the balance against
Yarmouth, it would rise when Yarmouth sinketh;
and, to stand thrashing no longer about it, Rye is
Rye, and no more but Rye and Yarmouth wheat
compared with it. Wherefore, had he been a right
clerk of the market, he would have set a higher
price on the one than the other, and set that one
of the highest price above the other.
Those, that deserve by common men's opinion
small commendation for any cunning sailing at all,
are not the Yarmouthers; however, there is a foul
fault in the print escaped, that cursedly squinteth
and leereth that way; but the bonny northern
cobles2 of his country, with their Indian canoes, or
boats like great beef trays, or kneading troughs,
firking as flight swift through the glassy fields of
TIKE.-i.e., dogfish.
'COBLES.-A peculiar kind of boat, very sharp in the bow, and flatbottomed, and square at the stemrn, navigated with a lug-sail.




48


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


Thetis, as if it were the land of ice, and sliding
over the boiling desert so early, and never bruise
one bubble of it, as though they contended to outstrip the light-foot tripper in the Metamorphosis,
who would run over the ripe-bending ears of corn,
and never shed or perish one kernel.  No such
iron-fisted Cyclops to hew it out of the flint, and
run through any thing as these frost-bitten crab-tree
faced lads, spun out of the hards of the tow, which
are donsel herrings lackies at Yarmouth every
fishing.
Let the careeringest billow confess and absolve
itself, before it prick up its bristles against them;
for, if it come up on their dancing horse, and offers
to tilt it with them, they will ask no trustier lances
than 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 we may, and to the gain of the Red-Herring
again, another crash.  IAem, if it were not for this
Huniades of the liquid element, that word Quadragesima, or Lent, might be clean sponged out of
the calendar, with Rogation Week, Saints'-Eves,
and the whole ragman roll of fasting days; and
fishmongers might keep Christmas all the year, for
any overlavish takings they should have of clowns
and clouted shoes, and the rubbish menialty; their
best customers, and their bloody adversaries, the




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


49


butchers, would never leave cleaving it out in the
whole chines, till they had got a Lord Mayor of
their company as well as they.  Nay out of their
wits they would be haunted with continual takings,
and stand cross-gagged, with knives in their mouths,
from one Shrove-Tuesday to another, and wear
candles-ends in their hat at Midsummer, having no
time to shave their pricks,1 or wash their fly-blown
aprons, if Domingo Rufus or Sacrapant Herring,
caused not the dice to run contrary.
The Romish rotten Pythagoreans, or Carthusian Friars, that mump on nothing but fish, in
what a phlegmatic predicament would they be, did
not this counter-poison of the spitting-sickness
(sixty-fold more restorative than bezer) patch them
out and preserve them, which being double roasted
and dried as it is, not only sucks up all the rheumatick inundations, but is a shoeing-horn for a pint
of wine overplus.
The sweet smack that Yarmouth finds in it,
and how it hath made it lippiludo Attica (as it was
said of IEgina, her near adjacent confronter) the
blemish and stain of all her salt-water sisters in
England, and multiplied it from a mole-hill of sand,
to a cloud-crowned Mount Teneriffe, abbreviately
and meetly, according to my old Sarum plain song I
have harped upon; and that, if there were no other
*PRICKS, -Skewers.




50


NASH's LENTEN STUFF,


certificate, or instance of the inlinked consanguinity
betwixt him and Lady Lucar, is instar mile, worth
a million of witnesses, to exemplify the riches of
him. The poets were trivial, that set up Helen's
face for such a top-gallant summer maypole for men
to gaze at, and strutted it out so in their buskin
brags of her beauty, whereof the only Circe's pass,
and repass, was that which 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 Mr. Ulysses, the prudent dwarf of Pallas, another, of whom      it is
Iliadized, that your very nose dropped sugar-candy,
and that your spittle was honey. Natalis Comes, if
he were above ground, would be sworn upon it.
th^I ou to  As loud a ringing" miracle, as the attractive melting
out at any miraale.     eye of that strumpet, can we supply them   with of
our dapper Piedmont Huldrick Herring, which
draweth more barques to Yarmouth bay, than her
beauty did to Troy. O! he is attended upon most
Babylonically, and Xerxes so evercloyed not the
Hellespont, with his frigates, gallies, and brigantines,
as he mantleth the narrow seas with his retinue,
being not much behind in the checkroll' of his
1CHECKROLL.-A roll or book containing the names of the servants in a
palace or large mansion. "To put out of checkroll," to dismiss a srvnt,




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


5I


janiraries1 and contributories, with eagle-soaring
Bolingbroke, that at his removing of household into
banishment, as Father Froissart threaps2 down, was
accompanied with forty-thousand men, women, and
children weeping, from London to the Land's end,
at Dover. (?) A colony of critical Zenos, should they
sinew their syllogistical cluster-fists in one bundle, to
confute and disprove moving, were they but, during
the time they might lap up a mess of buttered fish,
in Yarmouth one fishing, such a violent motion of
toiling myrmidons they should be spectators of, and
a confused stirring to and fro of a * Lepanto like *The sea battle
at   Lepanto,
host of unfatigable flood-bickerers, and  foam- fught n th be
curbers, that they would not move or stir one foot, aesty'sreign.
till they had disclaimed and abjured their bedrid
spittle positions.  In truth and sincerity, I never
crowded through this confluent Herring fair, but it
put me in memory of the great year of Jubilee, in
Edward the Third's time, in which it is sealed and
delivered under the hands of a publick notary,
three-hundred thousand people roamed to Rome,
for purgatory pills, and paternal venial benedictions,
and. the ways beyond sea were so bunged up with
your daily orators or beads-men, and your crutched
and crouched friars or cross-creepers and bare-foot
1JANIRARIEs. -Turkish soldiers.
'THAAPS. -To maintain.




52


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


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
and not their high statures, propagate the elevated
titles of their Gogmagogs. 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 Jews and Gentiles.
*The fatal   To fetch him in, in * Trojan equipage, some of
wooden horse at
with esuchpolmp the Christ-cross alphabet of outlandish cosmopoli
furrow up the rugged brine, and sweep through his
tumultuous ooze, will or nill he, rather than, in tendering their allegiance, they should be benighted
with tardity.  For our English Microcosmos or
Phoenician Dido's hide of ground, no shire, country,
count palatine, or quarter of it, but rigs out some
oaken squadron or other to waft him along
t Gte opatra's
glorious sailingCleopatraean t  Olympickly, t and not the least nook
to meet Anthony.
tThe solemn or crevice of them, but is parturient of the like
bringing  of the
champions  at
Olympus.  superofficiousness j, arming forth, though it be but a
11 Tugging forth
by thestrength of catch or pink no capabler than a rundlet or washingbowl, to imp the wings of his convoy. Holy St.
Taurbard, in what droves, the gouty-bagged Lon



OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


53


doners hurry down, and dye the watchet air of an iron
russet hue with the dust, that they raise in hot
spurred roweling it on to perform compliments unto
him? One beck more, to the bailiffs of the CinquePorts, whom I were a ruder barbarian than Smill, the
prince of the Crims and Nagayans, if in this action,
I should forget'; having had good cheer at their
tables, more than once or twice, whilst I loitered in
this paragonless fish-town, city, town or country.
Robin Hood and Little John, and who not, are industrious and careful to esquire and safe conduct him
in; but in ushering him in, next to the bailiffs of
Yarmouth, 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 sourcing from him. Being
thus entered or brought in, the consistorians, or
settled standers of Yarmouth, commence intestine
wars amongst themselves, who should give him the
largest hospitality, and gather about him, as flocking
to hansel him, and strike him good luck, as the
sweeting madams did about valiant Sir Walter
Manny, the martial tutor unto the Black Prince, he
that built the Charter-House; who being upon the
point of a hazardous journey into France, either to
win the horse, or lose the saddle (as it runs in the
proverb) and taking his leave at court, in a suit of
F




54


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


mail from top to toe, all the ladies clung about him,
and would not let him stretch out a step, till they
had fettered him, with their variable favours, and
embroidered over his armour, like a gaudy summer
mead, with their scarfs, bracelets, chains and ouches;
in generous regard 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 enraged on the shore to interdict his disembarking, through the thickest thorny quickset of
them, he would pierce, or be tost up to heaven, on
their spears; but, in honour of those debonair
Idealian nymphs and their spangled trappings, he
would be the first man should set foot in his kingdom, or unsheath steel against him.       As he proManny quas mised, so was his * Manly blade's execution; and, in
Manly, and from
kim, I take it. the
Mannys oet emulation of him, whole      herds of knights and
are descended.
gentlemen closed up their right eyes with a piece of
silk every one, and vowed never to uncover them,
or let them see light, till, in the advancement of
their mistresses beauties, they had enacted with
their brandished Bilboa blades2 some chivalrous
Bellerophon's trick at arms, that, from Salomon's
OUCHES.-A jewel, brooch, spangle, or necklace; but which is the
primary signification is not known.-See Nares' Glossary.
"BILBOA BLADES.-A sword of the best temper, the Spanish town of that
name having been once famous for their manufacture. They are mentioned by
Falstaff, whilst describing his position in the buck-basket,




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


55


Islands to St. Magnus Corner, might cry clang
again.
0! it was a brave age then, and so it is ever,
where there are offensive wars, and not defensive,
and men fight for the spoil, and not ip fear to be
spoiled, and are as lions, seeking out their prey, and
not as sheep, that lie still, whilst they are preyed on.
The Red-Herring is a legate of peace, and so
abhorrent from unnatural bloodshed, that if, in his
quarrel or bandying, who should harbinger him, there
be any hewing or slashing, or trials of life and death
there, where that hangman, emboweling, is, his
pursuivants or bailiffs return, Non est inventus; out
of one bailiwick he is fled, never to be fastened on
there more.  The Scotch jockies, or Red-shanks
(so sir-named of their immoderate munching up
the Red-shanks, or Red-Herrings,) uphold and make
good the same; their clack or gabbling to this purport: "How, in diebus illis, when   Robert de
"Breaux, their gud King, sent his deare heart to the
"Haly Land, for reason he caud not gang thider
"himself, (or then, or thereabout, or whilome before,
"or whilome after, it matters not) they had, the
"staple or fruits of the herring in their road or channel,
"till a foule ill feud arose amongst his sectaries and
"servitours; and there was mickle tule, and a black
"warld, and a deale of whinyards drawne about him,
"and many sacklesse wights and praty barnes run




56


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


"through the tender weambs; and, fra thence, ne
"sarry taile of a herring in thilke sound they caud
"gripe." This language, or parley, have 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 sympathy thereunto in our
own frothy streams we have took napping; wherefore without any further bolstering or backing, this
Scotch history may bear the palm; and, if any
further bolstering  or backing be required, it is
evident, by the confession of the six-hundred Scotch
witches executed in Scotland at Bartholomew-Tide
was twelvemonth, that, in Yarmouth Road, they
were all together in a plump on Christmas-Eve was
two years, when the great flood was, and there
stirred  up  such tornado's and hurricano's  of
tempests in envy, (as I collect) that the staple of the
Herring from them was translated to Yarmouth, as
will be spoken of there, whilst any winds, or storms
and tempests chafe and 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 jowl with her, or
coequal her; and there is no such manifest sign of
great prosperity, as a general envy encompassing it.
Kings and noblemen it cleaves unto, that walk
upright and are any thing happy; and even amongst




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


57


mean artificers it thrusts in its foot, one of them
envying another, if he have a knack above another,
or his gains be greater; and, if in his art they
cannot disgrace him, they will find a starting-hole in
his life, that shall confound 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 thereof, whose
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 out-work him.  Hydra Herring will have every
thing Sybarite ' dainty, where he lays knife a-board, *The Sybari es
ne erwould malt e
or he will fly them, he will not look upon them. ay banquet under  a  tweltmStately-born, stately sprung he is, the best blood of mnth' warnng
the Ptolemaues no statelier; and, with what state he
hath been used from his swaddling-clouts, I have
reiterated unto you; and, which is a note above
Ela, stately Hyperion, or the lordly sun, the most
rutilant planet of the seven, in Lent, when
Heralius Herring enters into his chief reign and
sceptredom, skippeth and danceth, the goat's jump
on the earth, for joy of its entrance. Do but mark
him on your walls, any morning at that season, how
he sallies and lavantoes, and you will say I am no
fabler.  Of so eye-bewitching, a deaurate, ruddy
dye is the skin-coat of this landgrave, that happy is




58


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


that nobleman, who, for his colours in armoury, can
nearest imitate his chemical temper. Nay, which is
more, if a man should tell you, that the god
Hymen's saffron-coloured  robe were  made of
nothing but Red-Herring skins, you would hardly
believe him. Such is the obduracy and hardness of
heart of a number of infidels, in these days, they will
tear herrings out of their skins, as fast as one of these
Exchequer-tellers can turn over a heap of money;
but his virtues, both exterior and interior, they have
no more taste of, than of a dish of stock-fish.
Somewhere I have snatched up a jest of a king,
that was desirous to try what kind of flesh-meat was
most nutritive and prosperous with a man's body;
and, to that purpose, he commanded four hungry
fellows, in four separate rooms, by themselves to be
shut up for a year and a day; whereof the first
should have his gut bombasted with beef, and
nothing else, till he cried Hold, Belly, hold; and so
the second to have his paunch crammed with pork,
the third with mutton, and the fourth with veal. At
the twelvemonth's end they were brought before
him, and he enquired of every one orderly, What he
had eat? Thereupon outstepped the stall-fed foreman, that had been at host with the fat ox, and was
grown as fat as an ox with tiring on the sirloins,
and baft in his face, Beef, Beef, Beef.  Next, the
Norfolk hog, or swine worrier, who had got him a




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


59


sagging pair of cheeks, like a sow's paps that gives
suck, with the plentiful mast set before him, came
lazily waddling in, and puffed out, Pork, Pork, Pork.
Then the sly sheep-biter issued into the midst, and
somersaulted and flip-flapped it twenty times above
ground as light as a feather, and cried, Mutton,
Mutton, Mutton. Last, the Essex calf, or lag-man,
who had lost the calves of his legs by gnawing on
the horse-legs, shuddering and quaking, limped
after, with a visage as pale as a piece of white
leather, and a staff in his hand, and an handkerchief
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
modern physicians, that to any sick languishers, if
they be able to waggle their chops, propound veal
for one of the highest nourishers.
But, had his Principality gone through with
fish as well as flesh, and put a man to livery with
the Red-Herring but as long, he would have come
in " Hurrey, Hurrey, Hurrey, as if he were harry- '^87h^to8ay
ing and chasing his enemies; and Bevis of [South] Urreye enof the
principle  places
Hampton, after he had been out of his diet, should wher7t^erri
not have been able to have stood before him. A
cholerick parcel of food it is, that whoso ties himself to rack and manger to for five summers, and
five winters, he shall beget a child that will be a




6o


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


soldier and a commander before he hath cast his
first teeth; and an Alexander, a Julius Caesar, a
Scanderbeg or a Barbarossa, he will prove ere he
aspire to thirty.
But to think on a Red-Herring, such a hot
stirring meat it is, 'tis enough to make the cravenest
dastard proclaim fire and sword against Spain:
The most itinerant virgin-wax phisiognomy, that
taints his throat with the least rib of it; it will
embrawn and iron-crust his flesh, and harden his soft
bleeding veins as stiff and robustious as branches
of coral. The art of kindling of fires, that is practised in the smoking and parching of him, is old
dog against the plague: Too foul-mouthed I am,
to becollow, or becollier him, with such chimneysweeping attributes of smoking and parching. Will
you have the secret of it?   This well-meaning
Paler palrig, and proveditor and supporter of
Yarmouth, (which is the lock and key of Norfolk,)
looking pale and sea-sick at his first landing, those
that be his stewards, or necessariest men about him,
whirl him, in a thought, out of the raw cold air, to
some stew or hot-house, where immuring himself for
three or four days, when he un-houseth him, or
hath cast off his shell, he is as freckled about the
gills, and looks as red as a fox, clammy, and is
more surly to be spoken with than ever he was




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.. before; and, like Lais of Corinth,l will smile upon
no man, except he may have his own asking.
There are that number of herrings vented out of
Yarmouth every year, (though the grammarians
make no plural number of Halec,) as not only they
are more by two thousand lasts than our own land
can spend, but they fill all other lands, to whom, at
their own prices, they sell them, and happy is he
that can first lay hold of them. And how can it be
otherwise?   For if Cornish pilchards, otherwise
called Fumados, taken on the shore of Cornwall,
from July to November, be so saleable as they are
in France, Spain, and Italy, which are but counterfeits to the Red-Herring, as copper to gold, or
lead to silver; much more their elbows itch for
joy, when they meet with the true gold, the true
Red-Herring itself. No true flying fish but he; or
if there be, that fish never flies but when his wings
are wet, and the Red-Herring flies best when his
wings are dry; throughout Belgium, High Germany,
France, Spain, and Italy he flies; and up into
Greece and Africa, south, and south-west, ostrichlike, walks his stations; and the sepulchre palmers
or pilgrims, because he is so portable, fill their scrips
1LAIS OF CORINTH.-A celebrated Greek courtesan. She first resided at
Corinth. The expenses which attended her pleasures gave rise to the proverb,
"Non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum" (It is not in every man's power
to visit Corinth). Her fame attracted even Demosthenes to visit her.




62


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


with them: Yea, no dispraise to the blood of the
Ottomans, the Nabuchedonesor of Constantinople,
and giantly Antaeus, that never yawneth or sneezeth
but he affrighteth the whole earth, gormandizing,
muncheth him up for imperial dainties, and will not
spare his idol Mahomet a bit with him, no not
though it would fetch him from heaven forty years
before his time; whence with his dove, that he
taught to peck barley out of his ear, and brought his
disciples into a fool's paradise, that it was the Holy
Ghost in her similitude, he is expected every minute
to descend; but, I am afraid, as he was troubled
with the falling sickness in his life-time, in like
manner it took him in his mounting up to heaven,
and so ab Inferno nulla redemptio, he is fallen backward into hell, and they are never more like to hear
of him.  Whilst I am shuffling and cutting with
these long-coated Turks, would any antiquary would
explicate unto me this remblere, or quiddity: Whether
*Turban, the those* turbanto grout-heads, that hang all men by the
great lawn roll,
e^thi the u^ throats on iron hooks, (even as our towers hang All
wear about their
head.    their herrings by the throats on wooden spits,) first
learned it of our herring men, or our herring men of
them? Why the Alkoranship of that Beelzebub of
the Saracens, Rhinoceros Zelim aforesaid, should so
much delight in this shiney animal, I cannot guess,
except he had a desire to imitate Midas in eating of




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


63


gold, or Dionysius in stripping of Jupiter of his golden
coat; and, to shoot my fool's bolt amongst you, that
fable of Midas's eating gold had no other shadow, or
inclusive pith in it, but he was of a squeamish stomach,
and nothing he could fancy, but this new-found gilded
fish, which Bacchus, at his request, gave him, though
it were not known here two thousand years after, for it
was the delicates of the gods, and no mortal food, till
of late years. Midas, inexperienced of the nature of
it, (for he was a fool, and had ass's ears,) snapped it up
at one blow, and, because in the boiling or seething
it in his maw, he felt it commotion a little and
upbraid him, he thought he had eaten gold indeed,
and thereupon directed his orisons to Bacchus afresh,
to help it out of his crop again, and have mercy upon
him and recover him; he, propensive and inclining
to Midas's devotion in every thing, in lieu of the
friendly hospitalities, drunken Silenus, his companion,
found at his hands when he strayed away from him,
bad him but go and wash himself in the river Pactolus,
(that is, go wash it down soundly with flowing cups of
wine,) and he should be as well as ever he was. By
the turning of the river Pactolus into gold, after he
had rinsed and clarified himself ini 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




64


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


would drink or quaff it; whereas, in wooden mazers,
and Agathocles2 earthen stuff, they trilled it off before,
and that was the first time that any golden cups were
used.
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, goldencoated   Red-Herring    without   welt   or  guard,
whom, for the strangeness of it, (they having never
beheld a beast of that hue before) in their temples
enshrined for a god; and, insomuch as Jupiter had
shewed them such slippery pranks more than once
or twice, in shifting himself into sundry shapes, and
raining himself down in gold into a woman's lap,3
they thought this too might be a trick of youth in
him, to alter himself into the form of this golden
scaglia, or  Red-Herring.     And therefore, as to
Jupiter, they fell down on their marrow bones and
lifted up their hay-rakes unto him.     Now, King
Dionysius being a good wise fellow, for he was
afterwards a schoolmaster, and had played the
'MAZER.-A bowl, or goblet
"A mighty mazer bowle of wine was sett,
As if it had to him been sacrifide."
Spencer's Fairy Queen, ii, xii, 49.
2AGATHOCLES was brought up as a potter at Syracuse.
8DANAE.-Daughter of Acrisius.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


65


coachman to Plato, and spit in Aristippus the
philosopher's face, many a time and oft, no sooner
entered their temple, and saw him sit under his
canopy so budgly, with a whole goldsmith's stall of
jewels and rich offerings at his feet, but to him he
stepped, and plucked him from his state with
a curse; then drawing out his knife iracundiously,
at one whisk lopped off his, head, and stripped
him out of his golden demy or mandilion,'
and flead him, and thrust him down his pudding-house at a gobb. Yet, long it prospered not
with him, so revengeful a just Jupiter is the RedHerring, for, as he tore him from his throne and,
uncased him of his habiliments, so, in a small
revolution of years, from his throne he was chased
and clean stripped of his royalty, and glad to play
the schoolmaster at Corinth, and take a rod in his
hand for his sceptre, and horn book pigmies for his
subjects, id est, (as I imitated some dozen lines
before) of a tyrant, to become a frowning pedant, or
schoolmaster.
Many of you have read these stories, and could
never pick out any such English; no more would
you of the Ismael Persians Haly, or Mortuus Alii
they worship, whose true etymology is, mortuum
halec, a dead Red-Herring, and no other, though, by


MANDILION. -A soldier's coat,




66


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


corruption of speech they false dialect and missound     it.    Let any       Persian     oppugn      this, and, in
spite of his hairy tuft, or love lock he leaves on the
top of    his crown,      to be    pulled up, or pullied         up to
heaven, by, I will set my foot to his, and fight it out
with him, that their fopperly God is not so good as
a Red-Herring. To recount ab ovo, or from the
church book of his birth, how the Herring first came
to be a fish, and then, how he came to be king of
fishes, and gradually, how from white to red he
changed would require as massy a tome as Holinshed;      but    in   half    pennyworth        of    paper     I   will
epitomise them.           Let me see, hath any body in
Yarmouth heard of Leander and Hero, of whom
divine Musxeus sung, and a diviner muse than him
Kit Marlowe1?
KIT MARLOWE. - Christopher, or, as he is familiarly called, Kit,
Marlowe was probably born about the year 1564, as he took up the degree
of B.A. at Cambridge in 1583.    "He was," says Beard, "by profession a
scholar, brought up from his youth in the University of Cambridge, but by
practice a playmaker and a poet of scurrility."  In the month of June, I593,
Marlowe was killed by a man to whom     "he owed a grudge," and who was
said to have been his rival under circumstances discreditable to both. The
man, whose name was Francis Archer, appears to have acted in self-defence.
According to the relations which are given of the story, Archer had asked
Marlowe to a feast at Deptford, and while they were playing at backgammon
Marlowe suddenly drew out his dagger, and attempted to stab his host; when
Archer perceiving his intention, avoided the blow, and quickly seizing his
own dagger, struck Marlowe in the eye, bringing away the brains as he withdrew the weapon.     Medical aid was immediately procured, but it was
unavailing; Marlowe died in a few hours.    Of the issue in reference to




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


Two faithful lovers, they were, as          every   apprentice in Paul's churchyard will tell you for
your    love,   and     sell   you     for   your    money.
The     one   dwelt     at   Abydos      in   Asia,   which
was    Leander, the       other which      was   Hero, his
mistress, or    Delia, at Sestos in      Europe, and     she
was a pretty pinkeyed and         Venus priest;     and but
an arm   of the sea divided them;         It divided them,
and it divided them not, for over that arm of the
sea could be made a long arm. In their parents
the most division rested; and their towns, that,
like  Yarmouth and       Lowestoff, were      still at wrig,
wrag, and sucked from their mother's teats serpentine
hatred one against each other; which drove Leander,
when he durst not deal above-board, or be seen
a-board any ship, to sail to his lady dear, to play
the dipopper and ducking water-spaniel to swim
to her, nor that in the day, but by owl-light.
What will not blind night do for blind Cupid?
And what will not blind Cupid do in the night,
Archer, nothing is known. Thus perished, at the untimely age of thirty, in
a mean brawl, the greatest dramatic poet in our language anterior to
Shakespeare.
Nash and Marlowe were contemporaries at Cambridge. Amongst the
papers Marlowe left behind him were the unfinished tragedy of Dido, afterwards completed for the stage by Nash, and the commencement of a paraphrase of the Greek poem ascribed to Musaeus of Hero and Leander, which
Chapman brought to a conclusion.  It was published for the first time in
i598-the year Nash visited Grcat Yarmlouth,




68


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


which is his blindman's holiday? By the sea-side
on the other side, stood Hero's tower; such another
tower as one of our Irish castles, that is not so wide
as a belfry, and a cobbler cannot jerk out his elbows
in; a cage or pigeon-house, roomsome enough to
comprehend her, and the toothless trot her nurse,
who was her only chatmate and chambermaid; consultively by her parents being so encloistered from
resort, that she might live a chaste vestal priest to
Venus,-the queen of unchastity. She would none of
that she thanked them, for she was better provided,
and that, which they thought served their turn best,
of sequestering her from company, served her turn
best to embrace the company she desired. Fate is
a spaniel that you cannot beat from you; the more
you think to cross it, the more you bless it and
further it.
Neither her father nor mother vowed chastity
when she was begot; therefore she thought they
begat her not to live chaste, and either she must
prove herself a bastard, or shew herself like them.
Of Leander you may write upon, and it is written
upon, she liked well; and, for all he was a naked
man, and clean despoiled to the skin, when he
sprawled through the brackish suds to scale her
tower, all the strength of it could not hold him
out. 0, ware a naked man! Cytherea's nuns had
no power to resist him; and some such quality is




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


69


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;
and, that he might not take cold after his swimming, she lay close by him to keep him warm.
This scuffling, or bopeep in the dark, they had a
while, without weam or brack, and the old nurse (as
there be three things seldom in their kind, till they
be old, a bawd, a witch, and a midwife) executed the
huckstring office of her years, very charily and circumspectly, till their sliding stars revolted from
them, and then, for seven days 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 drivelled upon
them as fast.
Hero wept as trickling as the heavens, to think
that heaven should so divorce them.   Leander
stormed worse than the storms, that, by them he
should be so restrained from his Cynthia.  At
Sestos was his soul, and he could not abide to tarry in
Abydos. Rain, snow, hail, or blow how it could, into
the pitchy Hellespont he leapt, when the moon and
all torch-bearers were afraid to peep out their heads;
but he was peppered for it; he had as good have
took meat, drink, and leisure, for the churlish, frampold' waves gave him his belly-full of fish-broth,
1FRAMPOLD.-Peevish; cross; vexatious.
G




70


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


ere, out of their laundry or wash-house they
would grant him his coquet, or Transire1; and not
only that, but they sealed him his Quietus est. for
curveting any more to the Maiden Tower, and
tossed his dead carcase, well bathed or parboiled, to
the sandy threshold of his lemon or orange, for a
dejernd, or morning breakfast.    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 cock-crowing, she
caught a little slumber, and then she dreamed, that
Leander and she were playing at check-stone,2 with
pearls, in the bottom of the sea.
You may see dreams are not so vain as they
are preached of, though, not in vain, preachers
inveigh against them, and bend themselves out of
people's minds to exhale their foolish superstition.
The rheum is the student's disease, and who study
most dream most. The labouring men's hands glow
and blister after their day's work: The glowing and
blistering of our brains, after our day-labouring cogitations, are dreams, and those dreams are raking
vapours of no impressions, if your matchless couches
1TRANSIRE (Lat.).-In law, a custom-house warrant, for permitting goods
to pass.
CHECKSTONE.-A game played by children with small round pebbles.
It is mentioned in the early play of "Apollo Shroving," i2mo, Lond. 1627,
p. 49.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


7I


be not half empty. Hero, hoped, and therefore she
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 combated 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
unloop her luket, or casement, to look whence the
blasts came, or what gait or pace the sea kept, when
forthwith her eyes bred her eyesore, the first white,
whereon their transpiercing arrows stuck, being the
breathless corpse of Leander; with the sudden
contemplation of this piteous spectacle of her love,
sodden to haddock's meat, 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 she ran in her loose night-gown, and her
hair about her ears (even as Semiramis ran out with
her lye-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 have kissed his dead corpse
alive again; but as, on his blue-jellied sturgeon lips
she was about to clap one of those warm plaisters,
boisterous wool-packs of ridged tides came rolling




72


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


in, and forced him from her (with a mind belike to
carry him back to Abydos.) At that she became a
frantick Bacchanal outright, and made no more
bones, but sprang after him, and so resigned up her
priesthood, and left work for Musaus and Kit
Marlowe.
The gods and goddesses, all on a row,
bread and crow, from Ops to Pomona, the first
apple-wife, were so dumped with this miserable
wreck, that they began to abhor all moisture for the
sea s sake; and Jupiter could not endure Ganymede,
his cup-bearer, to come in his presence, both for the
dislike he bore to Neptune's baneful liquor, 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 have toppled
his burning car, or hurry-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
won't, to wash him in the ocean, but under a tree
laid him down to rest in his clothes, at night; and
so did the scowling moon under another, hard by
him, which of that are behighted the trees of the
sun and moon, and are the same that Sir John
Mandeville tells us, he spoke with, and that spoke
to Alexander. Venus, for Hero was her priest, and




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


73


Juno Lucina the midwife's goddess, for she was now
quickened, and cast away by the cruelty of iEolus,
took bread and salt, and eat it, that they would be
smartly revenged on that truculent windy jailor;
and they forgot it not, for Venus made his son and
his daughter to commit incest together.  Lucina,
that there might be some lasting characters of his
shame, helped to bring her to bed of a godly boy,
and LEolus, bolting out all this, heaped murder upon
murder.
The dint of destiny could not be repealed in
the reviving of Hero and Leander; but their
heavenly hood's, in their synods, thus decreed, that, as
they were either of them sea-boarders, and drowned
in the sea, still to the sea they must belong, and be
divided in habitation after death, as they were in
their life-time. Leander, (for that in a cold, dark,
testy night he had his passport to Charon,) they terminated to the unquiet, cold coast of Iceland, where
half the year is nothing but dark night, and to that
fish translated him, which with us is termed Ling.
Hero, (for that she was paled and tympanized, and
sustained two losses under one,) they foot-balled their
heads together, and protested to make the stem of
her, loins of all fishes, the flaunting Fabian or Palmerin of England, which is Cadwallader Herring;
and as their meetings were but seldom, and not so
often as welcome, so but seldom should they meet in




74


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


the heel of the week, at the best men's tables, upon
Fridays and Saturdays, the holy time of Lent
exempted, and then they might be at meat and meal
for seven weeks together.
The nurse or mother Mampudding, that was a
cowring on the backside, whilst these things were a
tragedizing, led by the screech or outcry, to the prospect of this sorrowful heigho: as soon as, through
the raveled button-holes of her blear eyes, she had
sucked in and received such a revelation of doomsday, and that she saw her mistress mounted a cockhorse, and hoisted away to hell or to heaven, on the
backs of those rough-headed ruffians, down she sank
to the earth, as dead as a door nail, and never mumped
crust after. Whereof their supernalities (having a
drop or two pity left of the huge hogshead of tears,
they spent for Hero and Leander) seemed to be
something sorry, though they could not weep for it;
and because they would be sure to have a medicine,
that should make them weep at all times, to that
kind of grain they turned her, which we call
mustard-seed, as well for that she was a shrewish
snappish bawd, that would bite off a man's nose,
with an answer, and had rheumatic sore eyes, that
ran always, as that she might accompany Hero and
Leander, after death, as in her life-time; and hence
it is, that mustard bites a man so by the nose, and
makes him weep and water his plants, when he




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


75


tasteth it: and that Hero and Leander, (the RedHerring and Ling,) never come to the board without
mustard, their waiting-maid: and if you mark it,
mustard looks of the tanned wainscot hue, of such a
withered wrinkled-faced beldam, as she was, that
was altered    thereinto.     Loving   Hero, however
altered, had a smack of love still, and therefore to
the coast of Lovingland (to Yarmouth near adjoining,
and within her Liberties of Kirtley Road) she accustomed to come in pilgrimage, every year; but contentions arising there, and she remembering the
event of the contentions betwixt Sestos and Abydos,
that wrought both Leander's death and her's, shunneth it of late, and retired more northwards; so she
shunneth unquiet Humber, because Elstred was
drowned there, and the Scots seas, as before; and
every other sea where any blood hath been spilt, for
her own sea's sake, that spilt her sweet sweetheart's
blood and her's.
Whippit,1 turn to a new lesson, and strike we up
John for the King, or tell how the herring scrambled
up to be the King of all fishes.2      So it fell upon a
1WHIPPIT. -To jump about.
'KING OF ALL FISHES.-Ben Jonson makes COB, in his "Every Man
in his Humour,"-Act i, Scene 3,-say: "Mine ance'try came from a king's
belly, uo worse man; and yet no man neither, by your worship's leave I did
lie in that, but Herring, the king of fish; from his belly I proceed, one of
the monarchs of the world, I assure you. The first red herring that was broiled
in Adam and Eve's kitchen, do I fetch my pedigree from."




,6


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


time and tide, though not upon a holiday; a falconer
bringing over certain hawks out of Ireland, and airing them above hatches on ship-board, and giving
them stones to cast and scour, one of them broke
loose from his fist, before he was aware, which being
in her kingdom, when she was got upon her wings,
and finding herself empty gorged, after her casting;
up to heaven she towered to seek prey, 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 struck, 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 markfall so just in his mouth, chopped a-loft and snapped
her up bells and all, at a mouthful.  The news of
this murderous act being carried by the King's
fisher to the ears of the land fowls, there was
nothing but "Arm, arm, arm, to sea, to sea, swallow
and titmouse, to take chastisement of that trespass
of blood and death, committed against a peer of their
blood royal."
Preparations was made, the muster taken,
the leaders allotted, and had their bills to take
up pay; an old goshawk for general was appointed,
for marshal of the field a sparhawk, 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




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


77


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 upon any cock, and look upon any
trumpeter, and see if he look not as red as a cock,
after his trumpeting, and a cock as red as he, after
his crowing.) The kestrels or windsuckers, that
filling themselves with wind, fly against the wind
evermore, for their full-sailed standard-bearers; 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 land's end they trig all the sky-bred chirpers
of them; when they came there, AEquora nos lerrent,
et ponti tristis imago.  They had wings of goodwill to fly with, but no webs on their feet to swim
with, for except the water fowls have mercy upon
them, and stood their faithful confederates and backfriends, 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.   Insum, to the water fowls unanimately
they recourse, and besought duck and drake, swan
and goose, halcyons and sea-pies, cormorants and
sea-gulls for their hoary assistance, and aidful furtherance in this action.
They were not obdurate to be entreated, though
they had little cause to revenge the hawk's quarrel,




78


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


from them; having received so many high displeasures, and slaughters, and rapines of their race;
yet, in a general prosecution, private feuds they
trod under foot, 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 bewtixt either)
bewrayed this conspiracy to Protaeus's herds, or the
fraternity of fishes which the greater giants of
Russia and Iceland, as the whale, the sea-horse, the
morse, the wasserman1, the dolphin, the grampus,
fleered and jeered at as a ridiculous danger; but the
lesser pigmies and spawn of them thought it meet
to provide for themselves betimes, and elect a king
amongst them, that might lead 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 be, beshackled their wits,
and laid them a dry ground every one. No ravening fish they would put in arms, for fear after he had
everted their foes, and fleshed himself in blood, for
interchange of diet, he would raven up them.
Some politick delegatory Scipio, or witty-pated
Petito, like their heir of Laertes per aphaeresin,
Ulysses, well known unto them by his prolixious sea

1WASSERMAN. -Query?




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


79


wandering, and dancing on their topless totering
hills, they would single forth, if it might be, whom
they might depose when they list, if he should begin
to tyrannise; and such a one as, of himseif, 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 all their clamorous suffrages saluted with Vive
le roil God save the King, God save the King,
save only the plaice and the butt', that made wry
mouths at him, and for their mocking have 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 canvazado2, or whether some fowler with
his nets, as this host of feather-mongers 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 than 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 IEsop to unwarp, for my pen is tired in
it. But this is notorious, the Herring, from that time
BUTT. -A flounder.
2CANVASADO. -A stroke in fencing.




80


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


to this, hath gone with an army, and never stirs
abroad without it; and when he stirs abroad
with it, he sends out his scouts or sentinels before
him, that oftentimes are intercepted, and by their
parti-coloured liveries descried, whom the mariners,
after they have took, use in this sort:  Eight or
nine times they swing them about the main
mast, and bid them bring them so many last of
herrings, as they have swinged them times; and
that shall be their ransom, and so throw them into
the sea again.   King, by your leave, for, in your
kingship, I must leave you, and repeat how from
white to red you chameleonized.
It is to be read, or to be heard of, how in the
punyship or nonage of Cerdick Sands, when the best
houses and walls there were of mud, or canvas or
poldavies1 entiltments, a fisherman of Yarmouth,
having drawn so many herrings he wist not what to
do withal, hung the residue that he could not sell
nor spend, in the sooty roof of his shed a-drying:
Or say thus, his shed was a cabinet in decimo sexto,
built 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 be dry; for in the sea they
1POLpAVIES.-Tarpaulin, or any coarse wares.-" "I cannot draw it to
uch a curious web, therefore you must be content with homely poledavie ware
from me."-lHowvell's Letters.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


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
amends 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 whalebone when he hung them up, now looked as
red as a lobster.  It was four or five days before
either he or his wife espied it, and, when they espied
it, they fell down on their knees, and blessed themselves, and cried, A Miracle! A Miracle! and 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 miles 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 Waveny
running through many towns of High Suffolk up to
Bungay, and from thence encroaching nearer and
nearer to the sea, with its twining and winding it cuts
out an Island of some amplitude, named Lovingland:
the head town in that island is Lowestoff, in which,
be it known to all men, I was born; though my father
sprung from the Nash's of Herefordshire,




82


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


The next town from Lowestoff, towards
Yarmouth, is Corton and next Gorlstone.  More
inwardly, on the left-hand, where Waveny and the
river Ierus mix their waters, Cnoberi Urbs, the city
of Cnober, at this day termed Burgh, or Borough
Castle had its being.
This city and castle, say Bede and Master
Camden, or rather Mr. Camden 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, built
a monastery, at whose persuasion, Sigebert, king of
the East Angles, gave over his kingdom and led a
monastical life there; but forth of that monastery
he was hailed, against his will, to encourage his
subjects in their battle against the Mercians, where
he perished with them.
Nothing of that castle save tattered ragged
walls now remains, framed foursquare, and overgrown with briars and bushes, in stubbing up of
which, some time since they dug up Roman coins,
and buoys and anchors. Well, thither our fisherman
set the best leg before and unfolded to the King
his whole satchel of wonders.  The King was as
superstitious in worshiping those miraculous herrings
as the fisherman, licensed him to carry them up and
down the realm for strange monsters, giving to
Cerdick Sands (the birth place of such monstrosities)
many privileges; and, in that the quantity of them




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


83


that were caught so increased, he assigned a broken
sluice in the island of Lovingland, 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 pedlar's pack of them, in the papal chair of
Vigilius, he that first instituted saints eves, 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
lance-knights, by whom he was not only robbed of
all his money, but was fain to redeem his life beside,
with the better part of his ambry of burnished
fishes.
These herrings three, be rubbed and curried
over till his arms ached again, to make them glow
and glare like a Turkey brooch, or a London vintner's sign, thick jagged, and round fringed, with
theaming arsadine, and folding them in a diaper
napkin, as lily-white as a lady's marrying smock, to
the market place of Rome he was so bold as to
prefer them, and there, on a high stool, unbraced
and unlaced them, to any chapman's eye that would
buy them. The Pope's caterer, casting a liquorish
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 them? A




84


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


hundred ducats, he told him.  A hundred ducats,
quoth the Pope's 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 paunched
him up at a mouthful. Home went his Beatitude's
caterer with a flea in his ear, and discoursed to his
Holiness what had happened. Is it the king of
fishes? The Pope frowningly shook him up like a
cat in a blanket, and is any man to have 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 burnt his tail, and poured down the
herring merchant his hundred ducats for one of
those two of the king of fishes unsold, which then
he would not take, but stood upon two hundred.
Thereupon they broke off, the one urging that he
had offered it him so before; and the other, that he
might have took him at his proffer; which since he
refused, and now haftered1 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 spoke the word, but he did as he


HAFTERED. —Cavilled, wrangled.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


85


spoke.      With     a   heavy     heart   to   the   palace    the
yeoman of the mouth departed, and rehearsed this
second ill success, wherewith Peter's successor was
so in his mulligrums, that he had thought to have
buffeted him, and cursed him with Bell, Book, and
Candle;1     but    he  ruled    his  reason, and       bad   him,
1BELL, BOOK, AND CANDLE. —In the solemn form of excommunication
used in the Romish Church, the bell was tolled, the book of offices for the
purpose used, and three candles extinguished, with certain ceremonies; hence
this expression.
Bell, book, and candle, shall not drive me back
When gold and silver becks me to come on.
Four times a year, the following curse was read in the church, in terroren,
against all who in any way, defrauded the church of her dues. The prelate
stood in the pulpit in his albe, the cross was lifted up, and the candles lighted;
when he proceeded thus:
Thorow authoritie of Lord God Almighty, and our lady St. Mary, and all the
saints of heaven, of angels or archangels, patriarchs and prophets, evangelists,
apostles, martyrs, confessors, and virgins; also by the power of all holy church,
that our Lord Jesu Christ gave to S. Peter, we denounce all those accursed that
we have thus reckned to you: and all those that maintaine hem in her sins, or
given hem hereto either helpe or councell, so that they be departed from God,
and all holy church, and that they have noe part of the passion of our Lord Jesu
Christ, ne of noe sacraments that been in holy church, ne noe part of the prayers
among christen folke, but that they be accursed of God and of holy church, from
the sool of their foot unto the crown of their head, sleaping and waking,
sitting and standing, in all her words, and in all her workes, and but if [unless]
they have grace of God for to amend hem here in this life, for to dwell in the
pain of hell, for ever withouten end (fiat, fiat). Doe to the book, quench the
candle, ring the bell. Amen. Amen.
This form was extracted from the Canterbury book, by sir Thomas Ridley, or
his annotator, J. Gregory. See his view of the Civile and Ecclesiasticall Law,
p. 249. The days of cursing were Advent Sunday, the first Sunday in Lent,
the Sunday in the feast of Trinity, and the Sunday within the utas [or octave]
of the Virgin Mary. The curse was very like that of Emulphus,-In the
H




86


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


though it cost a million, to let him have that third
that rested behind, and hie 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 upon, 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-hundred, and, the
caterer grumbling thereat, the fisher swain was
forward to settle him to his tools, and tire upon 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 to gearmumble it,
sauce it, and dress it, and so sent him away a glad
man. All the Pope's cooks, in their white sleeves,
following passage the allusion is only jocular, applying the same form of words
to a different purpose:
I have a priest will mumble up a marriage,
Without bell, book, or candle.
Ram Alley, 0 PI., v. 447.
Where the candle seems only to be added from the custom of joining the three
together.-The use of the bell was supposed to be to fright away evil
spirits,Ring the saints-bell to affright
Far from hence the evil sprite.
Herrick's Work, p. 302.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


87


and linen aprons, met him mid-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 kitchen appeased that
strife, and would admit none but himself, to have
the scorching and carbonading of it, and he kissed
his hand thrice, and made as many humblessoes
before he would finger it; and, such obeisances
performed, he dressed it as he was enjoined,
kneeling on his knees, and mumbling twenty Ave
Maries to himself, in the sacrificing 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 unmeritorious.  The fire had not
pierced it, but, being a sweaty loggerhead, greasy
sulor, endungeoned in his pocket a twelvemonth, it
stunk so over the Pope's 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 stopping of their noses, between two dishes
they stewed it, and served it up. It was not come
within three chambers of the Pope, but he smelt it;
and, upon the smelling of it enquiring what it should
be that sent forth such a puissant perfume, the
standers-by declared that it was the king of fishes:
I conceited no less, said the Pope for less than a




88


8  NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


king he could not be that had so strong a scent;
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 law, to the kitchen they
returned him, whither, by and by, the whole college
of scarlet cardinals, with their crosiers, their censors,
their hosts, their Agnus dei's and crucifixes, flocked
together, in heaps, as it had been to the conclave, or
a general council, and the senior cardinal, that stood
next in election, to be Pope, heaved him up from
the dresser, with a dirge of de profundis natus est
fex; rex he should have said, and so have made
true Latin, but the spirable odour and pestilent
steam, ascending from it, put him out of his bias of
congruity, and, as true as the truest Latin of
Priscian, would have 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 Pope's canopy, and the other cardinals,
with their holy water sprinkles, quenched his foggy
fume and evaporating.   About and about the
inward and base court they circumducted him with
kyrie eleison, and halleluiah, and the chanters in
their golden copes, and white surplices, chanted it




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


89


out above Gloria Patri; in praising of him, the
organs played, the ordnance at the Castle of St.
Angelo went off, and all wind instruments blew as
loud as the wind in winter, in his passado to the
Pope's 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 busy epitasis1 of the comedy was, when
the dishes were uncovered, and the swart-rutter2
sowre took air, for then he made such an air as
Alcides himself, that cleansed the stables of
Augeas, nor any hostler was able to endure.
This is once, the Pope it popped under board,
and out of his palace worse it scared him than
Neptune's   phocases that scared    the  horses of
Hippolytus, or the harpies Jupiter dogs sent to vex
Phineus; the cardinals were at their ora pro nobis,
and held this suffocation a meet sufferance, for so
contemning the king of fishes, and his subjects, and
fleshly surfeiting in their carnivals.  Necromantic
sorcery, necromantic sorcery, some evil spirit of an
heretick it is, which thus molesteth his apostolickship.  The friars and monks caterwauled from    the
TEPITASIS (Gr.).-In the ancient drama, that part which embraces the
main action of a play, and leads on to the catastrophe.
2SWART-RUTTER, —" A reister or swart-rutter, a German horseman."Cotgrave.




9o


NASH's LENTEN STUFF,


abbots and priors to the novices, wherefore, tanquam
in circo, we will tronce him in a circle, and make
him tell what lanternman, or groom of Hecate's
close-stool he is, that thus nefariously and proditoriously profanes and penetrates our holy father's
nostrils: what needs there any more ambages?
The ringol, or ringed circle was compassed and
chalked out, and the king of fishes, by the name of
the king of fishes, conjured to appear in the centre
of it; but surdo canlant absurdi, sive surduim incantant fratres sordidi, he was a king absolute, and
would not be at every man's call; and if friar
Pendela and his fellows 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 be 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
have egress and regress to Rome, to crave their
benevolence of dirges, trentals, and so forth, to help
him forward on his journey to Limbus Patrum, or
Elysium; and because they would not easily believe
what tortures in purgatory he had sustained, unless
they were eye-witnesses of them, he thought to
represent to all their senses the image and idea of




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


9I


his combustion, and broiling there, and the horrible
stench of his sins accompanying both under his
frying and broiling on the coals, in the Pope's
kitchen, and the intolerable smell or stink he sent
forth under either.  Una voce in this spleen to Pope
Vigilius they ran, and craved that this king of fishes
might first have Christian burial; next, that he
might have masses sung for him, and last, that for a
Saint he would canonize him. All these he granted,
to be 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
almanack in the beginning of April; and see if you
can find out such a saint as Saint Gildard, which, in
honour of this gilded fish, the Pope ensainted; nor
there he rested and stopped, but in the mitigation of
the very embers whereon he was singed, that, after
he was taken by them, fumed most fulsomely of his
fatty droppings, he ordained Ember-weeks in their
memory, to be fasted everlastingly.
I had well nigh forgot a special point of my
Romish history, and that is, how Madam Celina
Cornificia, one of the curiousest courtezans of Rome,
when the fame of the king of fishes was canon-roared
in her ears, she sent all her jewels to the Jewish
Lombard to pawn, to buy and incaptive him to her
trencher; but her purveyor came a day after the fair,
and, as he came, so he fared, for not a scrap of him,




92


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


but the cobs of the two herrings, the fisherman had
eaten, remained of him, and those cobs, rather than
he would go home with a sleeveless answer, he
bought at the rate of fourscore ducats (they were
rich cobs you must rate them) and of them all cobbing
country chuffs, whicUbJmake their bellies and their
bags their Gods, are called rich cobs. Every man
will not clap hands at this tale: The Norwichers,
imnprimis, who say, the first gilding 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 miles 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 ring-bolts in the walls,
whereto ships were fastened) our Norwich, now
upon 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 Queen's peace, and no
man say bo to it; but, bawwaw, quoth Bagshaw, to
that which drawlatcheth behind, of the first taking of
herrings there, and currying and gilding them
amongst them; whereof, if they could whisper to us
any simple likelihood, or raw-bone carcass of reason,
more than their imaginary dream of Gilding-cross in
their parish of St. Saviour's, (now stumped up by the
roots) so named, as they would have it, of the smoky




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


93


gilding of Herrings there first invented, I could well
have allowed of; but they must bring better cards
before they win it from Yarmouth.
As good a toy to mock an ape was it of him,
that showed a country fellow the Red Sea, where all
the Red-Herrings were made (as some places in
the sea, where the sun is most transpiercing, and
beats with his rays ferventest, will look as red 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 Red-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
twitched 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 years since, were at the bubbling of Moorditch, swore by their Christendoms, that, as many
days and years as they had lived, they never saw
such a miracle of a Red-Herring taken in fresh
water before.  The greedy sea-gull, ignorance, is
apt to devour anything: For a new Messias they
are ready to expect of the Bedlam hatmaker's wife
by London Bridge; he that proclaims himself Elias,
and saith he is inspired with mutton and porridge:
And, with them, it is current, that Don Sebastian,




94


NASH'S LENTEN S TUFF,


King of Portugal, slain twenty years 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 gull them better than ever I have done;
and this I am sure, I have distributed gudgeon dole
amongst them, as God's plenty, as any stripling of
my slender of wit far or near. They needs will
have it so, much good do it them, I cannot do
withal: For, if but carelessly, betwixt sleeping and
waking, I write I know not what, against plebeian
publicans and sinners, no better than the sworn
brokers of candlestick-turners and tinkers, and leave
some terms in suspence, that my post-haste want of
argent will not give me elbow-room enough to
explain and 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
lawyer's cushion; and he, to approve himself an
extravagant statesman, catcheth hold of a rush, and
absolutely concludeth, it is meaned the Emperor of
Russia, and that it will utterly mar the traffick into
that country, if all the pamphlets be not called in
and suppressed, wherein that libelling word is mentioned. Another, if but a head or tail of any beast,
he boasts of in his crest or his escutcheon, be reckoned up by chance in a volume where a man hath
just occasion to reckon up all beasts in armoury, he




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


95


straight engageth himself, by the honour of his house
and his never reculed sword, to thrash down the
hairy roof of that brain that so seditiously mutinied
against him, with the mortiferous bastinado; or cast
such an incurable Italian trench in his face, as not
the basest creeper upon pattens by the highwayside, but shall abhor him worse than the carrion of a
dead corpse, or a man hanged up in gibbets.
I will deal more boldly, and yet it shall be
securely, and in the way of honesty, to a number of
God's fools, that, for their wealth might by deep
wise men, and so forth (as now-a-days, 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 mangle cum pulre, and I know not what to
make of myself, have fished out such a deep politic
state meaning, as if I had all the secrets of court
and commonwealth at my fingers ends. Talk I of a
bear; 0, 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 meaned 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 than that, straight
thunders out his displeasure, and showers down the


)I




96


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


whole tempest of his indignation upon 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 than himself,
videlicet, 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 and fly out
they care not how against a man's life, his person,
his parentage, two hours before they come to the
point, little remembering their own privy escapes
with their laundresses, or their night walks to
St. Pancras, together with the hobnailed houses of
their carterly ancestry, from whence they are sprung,
that have cooled plough jades buttocks time out of
mind, with the breath of their whistling, and with
retailing their dung to manure lands, and selling
straw and chaff, scratched up the pence to make
them  gentlemen.  But, Lord, how miserably do
these ethnicks, when they once match to the purpose, set words on the tenters, never reading to a
period, which you shall scarce find in thirty sheets
of a lawyer's declaration, whereby they might comprehend the entire sense of the writer together, but
disjoint 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 into disgrace
by ill-favoured mouthing and mis-sounding it.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


97


These be they, that use men's writings like brute
beasts, to make them draw which way they list, as a
principal agent, in church controversies of this our
time, complaineth.
I have read a tale of a poor man and an
advocate, which poor man complained to the
King of wrong that the advocate had done, 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 be at that pass, that you will pause
to hear what he will say, I have utterly lost my cow,
for he hath words enough to make fools of ten
thousand. So he, that shall have his lines bandied
by our usual plodders in Fitzherbert, let him not
care whether they be right or wrong; for they will
writh and turn them as they list, and make the
author believe he meaned that which he did not
mean; and, for a knitting up conclusion, his credit
is unreprievably lost, that, on bare suspicion in such
cases, shall but have his name controverted amongst
them; and, 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 confound a man's memory with their tedious
babbling, and, in the first three words of his apology,
with impudent exclamation, interrupt him; whereas
their mercenary tongues, lie they never so loudly,




98


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


without check or control, must have their free
passage for five hours 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 untainted consciences
with corruption; and, from some of them, I avow,
I have heard as excellent things flow, as ever I
observed in Tully or Demosthenes.  Those that
were present at the arraignment of Lopus, (to insist
upon no other particular, hereof,) I am sure, will bear
me record. Latinless dolts, saturnine heavy-headed
blunderers, my invective hath relation to; such as
count all arts puppet-plays, and pretty rattles to
please children, in comparison of their confused
barbarous law, 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 persuasion 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 have consented to study this
uncivil Norman hotchpotch?  This sow of lead,
that hath never a ring at the end to lift it up by,
is, without head, or foot, the deformedest monster
that may be! I stand lawing here, what with these
lawyers, and self-conceited misinterpreters, so long,
that my Red-Herring, which was hot broiling on




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


99


the coals, is waxed stark cold for want of blowing.
Have with them for a riddle or two, only to set their
wits a nibbling, and their jobbernowls a working,
and so good night to the seignories, but, with this
indentment and caution, that, though there be
neither rhyme nor reason in it, as, by my goodwill
there shall not, they, according to their accustomed
gentle favours, whether I will or no, shall supply it
with either, and run over all the peers of the land
in peevish moralising 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
sensed and thurified in the smoke, and had got him
a suit of durance, that would last longer than one
of Erra Pater's almanacks, or a constable's brown
bill; only 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 sweetsinging calander to the state, yet, not beloved of the
showery Pleiades, 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 tuft-taffeta eighteen
years; and to Lady Turbot there is no demur but
he would needs go a-wooing, and offered her, for a
dowry, whole hetacombs, and a two-handed sword;
she stared upon him with Megara's eyes, (like Iris




100


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


the messenger of Juno,) and bad him go eat a fool's
head and garlick, for she would have none of him;
thereupon, particularly, strictly, and usually, he
replied,  " That, though thunder never lights on
Phoebus's tree, and Amphion, that worthy musician,
was husband to Niobe, and there was no such
acceptable incense to the heavens as the blood of
a traitor; revenged he would be, by one chimera of
imagination or other, and hamper and embark her
in those mortal streights, for her disdain, that, in
spite of divine symmetry and miniature, into her
busky grove she should let him enter, and bid
adieu, sweet Lord, or the cramp of death should
wrest her heart-strings."
This speech was no spirable odour to the
Achelous of her audience; whereupon, she charged
him, by the extreme lineaments of the Erimanthean
bear, and by the privy fistula of the Pierides, to
commit no such excruciating syllables to the yielding air; for she would sooner make her a French
hood of a cowshard,1 and a gown of spider's webs,
with the sleeves drawn out with cabbages, than be
so contaminated any more with his abortive loathly
motives: With this, in an Olympick rage, he calls
for a clean shirt, and puts on five pair of buskins,
and seeketh out eloquent Xenophon, (out of whose


COWSHARD.-Cowdung.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


101


mouth the Muses spoke,) to declaim, in open court,
against her.
The action is entered, the complaint of her
wintered brows presented, of a violent rape of his
heart she is indicted and convicted. The circumstance that follows you may imagine or suppose;
or, without supposing and imagining, I will tell
you, the nut was cracked, the strife discussed, and
the centre of her heart laid open; and, to this wild
of sorrow and excruciament she was confined,
either to be held a flat thornback, or sharp pricking
dog-fish to the public weal, or seal herself close to
his seal-skinned riveled lips, and suffer herself, as
a spirit, to be conjured into the hellish circle of
his embraces.
It would not be good cropshin, Madam Turbot
could not away with such a dry withered carcass to
lie by her; curray rex, vivalt lex, come what would,
she would have none of him; wherefore, as a
poisoner of mankind with her beauty, she was
adjudged to be boiled to death in hot scalding
water, and to have her posterity thoroughly sauced,
and soused, and pickled in barrels of brinish tears,
so ruthful and dolorous, that the inhabitants on the
Bosphorus should be laxative in deploring it. O!
for a legion of mice-eyed decipherers and calculators
upon characters, now to augurate what I mean by
this; the devil, if it stood upon his salvation, canI




102


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


not do it, much less petty devils, and cruel
Rhadamanths upon earth (elsewhere in France and
Italy subintelligiur, and not in our auspicious
island climate) men that have no means to purchase
credit with their prince, but by putting him still in
fear, and beating into his opinion, that they are the
only 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 madman in an intoxicated 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 King's chamber,
and awake him at midnight to reveal it.
Say, that a more piercing lynceous sight should
dive into the entrails of this insinuating parasite's
knavery; to the strapado and the stretching torture
he will refer it for trial, and there either tear him
limb from limb, but he will extract some capital
confession from him, that shall concern the Prince's
life, and his crown and dignity, and bring himself in
such necessary request about his Prince, that he
may hold him for his right hand, and the only staff




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


103


of his royalty, and think he were undone, if he were
without him; when the poor fellow, so tyrannously
handled, would rather, in that extremity of convulsion, confess he crucified Jesus Christ, than abide
it any longer. I am not against it (for, God forbid
I should) that it behoves all loyal, true subjects to
be vigilant and jealous for their Prince's safety; and,
certainly too jealous and vigilant of it they cannot
be, if they be good princes that reign over them, nor
use too many means of disquisition by tortures, or
otherwise, to discover treasons pretended against
them; but, upon the least wagging of a straw, to
put them, in fear where no fear is, and make a
hurly-burly in the realm upon had I wist, not so much
for any zeal or love to their princes, or tender care
of their preservation, as to pick thanks and curry a
little favour, that thereby they may lay the foundation to build a suit on, or cross some great enemy
they have, I will maintain, it is most lewd and
detestable; I accuse none, but such there have been
belonging to princes in former ages, if there be not
at this hour.
Stay, let me look about: Where am I? In my
text, or out of it? Not out, for a groat; Out, for an
angel: Nay, I will lay no wagers, for, now I perponder more sadly upon it, I think I am out
indeed,  Bear with it; it was but a pretty parenthesis of princes and their parasites, which shall do




104


N4NASIH'S LENTEN STUFF,


you no harm, for L will cloy you with Herring before
we part.
Will you have the other riddle of the cropshin,
to make up the pair that I promised you? You
shall, you shall (not have it, I mean) but bear with
me, for I cannot spare it, and, I persuade myself
you will be well contended to spare it, except it
were better than the former; and yet, I pray you,
What fault can you find with the former? Hath it
any more sense in it, than it should have? Is it not
right of the merry cobbler's cut, in the witty play of
"The Case is Altered?"1
I will speak a proud word, though it may be
accounted arrogancy in me to praise my own- stuff:
If it be not more absurd than Phillip's 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
bare-headed to a nobleman, and not get of him the
price of a periwig to cover my bare crown; no, not
so much as a pipe of tobacco to raise my spirits, and
warm my brain.
My readers, peradventure, may see more into it
than I can; for, in comparison of them, in whatso1THE CASE is ALTERED.-A comedy attributed to Ben Jonson, and
written before the end of the year s599, although not printed till ten years after.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


I05


ever I set forth I am (Bernardus non vidit omnia) as
blind as blind Bayard, and have the eyes of a
beetle; nothing from them is obscure, they being
quicker sighted than the sun, to espy in his beams
the motes that are not, and able to transform the
lightest murmuring gnat to an elephant.  Carp, or
descant they, as their spleen moves them, my spleen
moves me not to defile my hands with them, but to
fall a crash more to the Red-Herring.
How many are there in the world, that childishly
deprave alchymy, and cannot spell the first letter of
it! In the black book of which ignorant band of
scorners, it may be, I am scored up with the highest:
If I am, I must entreat them to wipe me out, for the
Red-Herring hath lately been my ghostly father to
convert me to their faith; the probalum est of whose
transfiguration ex luza in solem, from his dusky tin
hue into a perfect golden blandishment, only by the
foggy smoke of the grossest kind of fire that is,
illumines, my speculative soul, what much more, not
sophisticate, or superficial effects, but absolute, essential alterations of metals there may be made by an
artificial, repurified flame, and divers other helps of
nature added besides.
Cornelius Agrippa maketh mention of some
philosophers, that held the skin of the sheep, that
bore the golden fleece, to be nothing but a book of
alchymy written upon it; so, if we should examine




Io6


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF.


matters to the proof, we should find the RedHerring's skin to be little less:     The accidence of
alchymy I will swear it is, be it but for that experiment of his smoking alone; and, (which is a secret
that all tapsters will curse me for blabbing,) in his
skin there is plain witchcraft; for, do but rub a can,
or quart pot round about the mouth with it, let the
cunningest lick-spiggot swelt his heart out, the beer
shall never foam or froth in the cup, whereby to
deceive men of their measure, but be as settled as if
it stood all night.
Next, to draw on hounds to a scent, to a RedHerring's skin there is nothing comparable; the
round, or cob of it, dried and beaten to powder, is
ipse ile against the stone; and, of the whole body of
it itself, the finest ladies beyond seas frame their
kickshaws.
The rebel Jack Cade was the first, that devised
to put Red-Herrings in cades,' and from him they
have their name.      Now, as we call it, the swinging
of Herrings, when he caded them; so in a halter was
'CADEs.-A cade of herrings, a cask or barrel containing six hundred of
them, from which keg is evidently corrupted. There can be no doubt that it
was made from cadus, notwithstanding Nash's fanciful, or rather jocular derivation, in his Lenten Stuff, or Praise of the Red-H erring. Shakespeare
has turned the derivation the contrary way:".lack Cade.-We, John Cade, so called from our supposed father"Dick.-Or rather of stealing a cade of herrings (aside)."
Nares' Glossary.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


IO7


he swung, and trussed up as hard and round as any
cade of Herrings he trussed up in his time, and
perhaps of his being so swung and trussed up,
having first found out the trick to cade herring, they
would so much honour him in his death, as not only
to call it swinging, but cading of herring also.  If
the text will bear this, we will force it to bear more,
but it shall be but the weight of a straw, or the
weight of Jack Straw more, who with the same
Grwca fide, I marted unto you in the former, was
the first that put the Red-Herring in straw, over
head and ears like beggars, and the fishermen upon
that Jack-strawed him ever after; and some, (for he
was so beggarly a knave that challenged to be a
gentleman, and had no wit nor wealth but what he
got by the warm wrapping up 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 are,
as, "Never a barrel better herring; Neither flesh nor
fish, nor good Red-Herring," which those, that have
bitten with ill bargains of either sort, have dribbed
forth in revenge, and yet not have them from Yarmouth; many coast towns, besides it, enterprising
to cure, 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
Martial for calling it putre halec, the scald rotten




I08


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


herring; but he meant that of the fat restive Scottish
herrings, which will endure no salt, and in one
month (bestow what cost on them you will) wax
rammish, if they be kept; whereas our embarreled
white herrings, flourishing with the stately brand of
Yarmouth upon them, (sciliced, the three half lions,
and three half fishes, with the crown over their
head,) last in long voyages, better than the RedHerring, and not only are famous at Rouen, Paris,
Dieppe, and Caen (whereof the first, which is Rouen,
serveth all the high countries of France with it, and
Dieppe, which is the last save one, victuals all
Picardy with it) but here at home is made account
of like a Marquess, and received at court right
solemnly; I care not much if I rehearse to you the
manner, and that is thus:
Every year about Lent-Tide, the sheriffs of Norwich bake certain herring pies, (four and twenty as I
take it,) and send them as a homage to the Lord of
Castor hard by there, for lands that they hold of
him; who presently upon the like tenure, in bouncing
hampers covered over with his cloth of arms, sees
them conveyed to the Court in the best equipage;
at Court when they 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  unloaded his
luggage, to supper he sets him down like a lord,




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


I09


with his wax lights before him, and hath his mess of
meat allowed him with the largest, and his horses
(quacenus horsesJ are provendered as epicurely:
After this, some four mark fee towards his charges
is tendered him, and he jogs home again merrily.
A white pickle herring? Why, it is meat for
a Prince. Haunce Vandervecke of Rotterdam, (as a
Dutch post informed me,) in bare pickled herring,
laid out twenty thousand pounds, the last fishing:
He had lost his drinking belike, and thought to
store himself of medicines enough to recover it.
Noble Caesarean Charlemagne Herring, Pliny
and Gesner were to blame they slubbered thee over
so negligently.  I do not see why any man should
envy thee, since thou art none of these Lurcones or
Epulones, gluttons, or flesh-pots of Egypt (as one,
that writes of the Christians captivity under the
Turk, styleth us Englishmen) nor livest thou by the
unliving or eviscerating of others, as most fishes do,
or by an extraordinary filth whatsoever; but, as the
chameleon liveth by the air, and the salamander by
the fire, so only by the water art thou nourished,
and nought else, and must swim as well dead as
alive.
Be of good cheer, my weary readers, for I have
espied land, as Diogenes said to his weary scholars,
when he had read to a waste leaf. Fishermen, I
hope, will not find fault with me for fishing before




I IO


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


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
Erichthonius amongst them, 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 ponlo,
The sea is a slippery companion, take heed how you
trust him.
And further,
- Perjurii pcnas repetit ille locus,
It is a place like hell, good for nothing but to
punish perjurers:
With innumerable invectives more against
it, throughout in every book.
Plautus, in his Rudens, bringeth in fishermen
cowthrihg and quaking, dung-wet after a storm, and
complaining their miserable case in this form:
Captamus cibum e mari; si eventus non venit, neque
quicquam captum est piscium, salsi lautique domum
redimus clancuzlum, dorminus incenati: "All the meat
that we eat we catch out of the sea, and if there we
miss, well washed and salted, we sneak home to bed
supperless;" and upon the tail of it he brings in a
parasite that flouteth and bourdeth them thus: Heus




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


I I I


vos famelica gens hominum, ut vivi/is, ut periis?
Hough! you hunger-starved gubbins, or offals of
men, how thrive you? how perish you? And they
cringing in their necks, like rats, smothered in the
hold, poorly replied, Vivimus fame, speque siique,
"With hunger and hope, and thirst, we content ourselves."  If you would not misconceit, that I
studiouly intended your defamation, you should have
thick hail-shot 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 galliard crosspoints, and kickshiwinshes, of giddy ear-wig brains,
were it not I thought you too fretful and cholerick
with feeding altogether on salt meats, to have the
secrets of your trade in publick displayed.  Will
this appease you, that you are the predecessors of
the Apostles, who were poorer fishermen than you?
That, for your seeing wonders in the deep, you may
be the sons and heirs of the prophet Jonas; that
you are all cavaliers and gentlemen, since the king
of fishes vouchsafed you for his subjects; that, for
your selling smoke, you may be courtiers, for your
keeping of fasting days friar observants; and lastly,
that, look in what town there is the sign of the three




11I2


NASH'S LENTEN STUFF,


mariners, the huff-cappest1 drink in that house you
shall be sure of always.
No more can I do for you than I have done,
were you my God-children every one: God make
you his children, and keep you from the Dunkirkers, and then, I doubt not but, when you are
driven  into harbour by foul weather, the cans
shall walk to the health of " Nashe's Lenten Stuff,
or the Praise of the Red-Herring"; and even those
that attend upon the pitch kettle, will be drunk to
to my good fortunes and recommendums. One boon
you must not refuse me in (if you be boni socia and
sweet Olivers) that you let not your rusty swords
sleep in their scabbards, but lash them out in my
quarrel as hotly, as if you were to cut cables, or hew
the main-mast over board, when you hear me mangled
and torn in men's mouths about this playing with a
shuttlecock, or tossing empty bladders in the air.
Alas! poor hunger-starved muse, we shall have
some spawn of a goose-quill, or overworn pander,
quirking and girding, " Was it so hard driven that it
had nothing to feed upon 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 have writ of a dog's turd, (in his teeth
1HUFF-CAP.-Strong ale. " These men hale at huf cap till they be red
as cocks, and little wiser than their combs."-Ilarrlson's England, p. 202.




OR PRAISE OF THE RED-HERRING.


I 3


sir-reverence.) But, let none of these scum of the
suburbs be too vinegar tart with me; for, if they are,
I'll take mine oath upon a Red-Herring and eat it,
to prove that their fathers, their grandfathers, and
their great grandfathers, or any other of their kin,
were, scullions dishwash, and dirty draff and swill
set against a Red-Herring.  The puissant RedHerring, the golden Hesperides Red-Herring, the
Mseonian Red-Herring, the Red-Herring of RedHerring's Hall, every pregnant peculiar of whose
resplendent laud and honour, to delineate and adumbrate to the ample life, were a work that would
drink dry fourscore and eighteen Castilian fountains
of eloquence, consume another Athens of facundity
and abate the haughtiest poetical fury betwixt this
and the burning zone and the tropick of Cancer.
My conceit is cast into a sweating sickness, with
ascending these few steps of his renown; into what
a hot broiling Saint Laurence's 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
RED-HERRING      FOR
YARMOUTH.








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