certainly does as Dame Juliana Berners bears witness. Anyhow Plato, to my own great relief, allows angling. "The fisherman too, may be allowed his sport in all places except harbours, sacred rivers, fens and marshes, if only he does not use the herbal defilement "-to poison the water. Plato's disparagement of angling is not hard to understand if you turn to the Sophist, for he saw in the angler a lively picture of his mortal enemy, the sophist, who caught unwary victims by guile, striking them about the head, with his deadly skill. So it is a very great concession that he allows a sport in the Laws, which he would not tolerate in his earlier writings.*

But why not in harbours, marshes and fens? asked my cousin. Nominally no doubt because the fish would be less wholesome, in these places, but really because the sophists left the lean and rugged lands, the poor and the strenuous, and gathered in flocks upon the fat, rich lands-the wealthy classes. If you press me I must confess also that Plato would much prefer the

* ἐνυγροθηρευτὴν δὲ πλὴν ἐν λιμέσι καὶ ἱεροῖς ποταμοῖς τε καὶ ἔλεσι καὶ λίμναις, ἐν τοῖς ἄλλοις δὲ ἐξέστω θηρεύειν, μὴ χρώμενον ὁπῶν ἀναθολώσει μόνον.—DE L., VII, 823.

activity of fly whipping before the less vigorous bottom fishing.

Here my fair cousin caused a diversion by asking our old friend, if he knew what herbal decoctions Plato's fisherman would be tempted to use. He was rather shy of this question, for he flattered himself not upon being a scholar, which he was, but upon being a sportsman, which he was not; and he would not have it be known that he had given this murderous subject any consideration at all. However he first suggested κυκλάμινος—cyclamen ! "When I was at Exeter, I remember asking my old tutor, Mr. Boase," he said, "this same question, and he thought that the juice of fig trees which the Greeks used as rennet might be pointed at," and he also quoted from some medical author, I forget whom, a passage about the sea spurge tithymalus paralius now called euphorbeum parellias. Galen says that spurge milk mixed with meal does this. Pliny tells us that birthwort was so used off the coast of Campania, that leopard's bane has the same effect, also henbane mixed with Coculus Indicus caused fish to float for a while; while ivy, wild blites, and leaves of French beans were used to attract

to the angle. "And have you ever tried these things?" we asked both together. Our friend's eyes twinkled and he confessed that once upon a time, he and another undergraduate, now degenerated into an archdeacon, had collected these plants and stewed them in a small saucepan borrowed from a scout; that they had brewed the horrid mixture with sported oak and a guilty secrecy, and had stolen forth next morning early, to an eddy in Mesopotamia, where they had but yesterday seen an angler catching roaches, and dropped in the spurge meal and other preparations. Then they watched with keen anxiety, but never a fish turned turtle nor showed the smallest inconvenience, though they patrolled Mesopotamia expectantly till long past lunch time, and noticed many fishes rising after flies, as merrily as if no designs were ever hatched against their peace. It is impossible to say why the plan failed. Karteros attributed the ill success to the boiling, which was not suggested in any author. The other conspirator, who had planned and executed the illicit cookery, thought that the volume of water was too great for their small parcels of venom and suggested that they should

F

re-brew and then try the Cherwell at Addison's walk, but the unhappy herbal odours which haunted their rooms, a sceptical spirit which doubted the actuality of the ancients, and also, it is to be hoped, some sense of shame and compunction, held their hands from this iniquitous experiment. If these illicit acts had been known, my friend would have, quite rightly, forfeited the esteem of nearly all his contemporaries.

He was not unconscious of this, and of the shocked faces about him, so he hastily gulped down his whiskey and took his departure, dubbin and all, a little out of favour with the whole company,-with the ladies for his horse grease, with his brothers of the craft for the base sallies of his youth, and I fear with the patient reader for his excursions into the realms of what our modern' educated' men look upon as 'shop,' and uneducated ones as dismal and dusty regions.

Not to be outdone before the ladies by the display of learning we had just put up with, a young bachelor suggested that he could find some entertaining fish stories, if he might have a candle, and fer, ferk and ferret in the library for a little. We gladly

gave him leave and he came back with Cotton's edition of Michael Seigneur de Montaigne from whose fifty-fourth chapter, he culled many pleasant flowers, and read them with a modest and yet roguish voice to our general content. "Plato in his picture of the golden age under Saturn reckons amongst the chief advantages that a man then had, his communication with beasts, of whom inquiring and informing himself he knew the true qualities and differences of them all, by which he acquired a very perfect intelligence and prudence and led his life more happily than we can do. Need we a greater proof to condemn a human impudence in the concern of beasts? This great author was of opinion that nature, for the most part, in the corporal form she gave them, had only regard to the usance of prognosticks that were in his time thence derived. The defect that hinders communication betwixt them and us, why may it not be on our part, as well as theirs? 'Tis yet to determine, where the fault lies that we understand not one another: for we understand them no more than they do us, and by the same reason may think us to be beasts, as we think them And yet some have