CHAP. II.] THE FIRST DA Y. 233 



VIATOR. Well, if ever I come to London, of which many a 

 man there, if he were in my place, would make a question, I will 

 sit down and write my travels ; and, like Tom Coriate,* print 

 them at my own charge. Pray what do you call this hill we 

 came down ? 



PISCATOR. We call it Hanson-Toot. 



VIATOR. Why, farewell, Hanson-Toot ! I'll no more on thee : 

 I'll go twenty miles about, first. Puh ! I sweat, that my shirt 

 sticks to my back. 



PISCATOR. Come, Sir, now we are up the hill ; and now how 

 do you ? 



VIATOR. Why, very well, I humbly thank you, Sir, and warm 

 enough, I assure you. What have we here, a church? As I'm 

 an honest man, a very pretty church ! Have you churches in this 

 country, Sir? 



* Tom Coriate lived in the reign of King James the First ; and, as Anthony Wood 

 calls him, was the whetstone of all the wits of that age : and indeed the allusions to him, 

 and to the singular oddness of. his character, are numberless. He travelled almost over 

 Europe on foot ; and in that tour walked 900 miles with one pair of shoes, which he got 

 mended at Zurich. Afterwards he visited Turkey, Persia, and the Great Mogul's 

 dominions, travelling in so frugal a manner, that as he tells his mother, in a letter to 

 her in his ten months' travels, between Aleppo and the Mogul's court, he spent but 

 three pounds sterling ; living remarkably well for about twopence sterling a day ; and of 

 that three pounds he elsewhere says, he was cozened of no less than ten shillings sterling 

 by certain Christians of the Armenian nation ; so that, indeed, he spent but fifty shillings 

 in his ten months' travels. In these his travels, he attained to great proficiency both in 

 the Persian and Indostan languages ; in the former, he made and pronounced an oration 

 to the Great Mogul ; and his skill in the latter, he took occasion to manifest in the 

 following very signal instance. In the service of the English ambassador, then resident, 

 was a woman of Indostan, a laundress, whose frequent practice it was to scold, brawl, 

 and rail, from sunrising to sunset. This formidable shrew did Coriate one day under- 

 take to scold with, in her own language ; and succeeded so well in the attempt, that, by 

 eight of the clock in the morning, he had totally silenced her, leaving her not a word to 

 speak. See A Voyage to East India, by Edward Terry, chaplain to Sir Tho. Row, 

 ambassador to the Great Mogul, 12010, 1655. Further, it appears that he was a zealous 

 champion for the Christian religion against the Mahometans and Pagans ; in the defence 

 whereof he sometimes risked his life. In Turkey, when a priest, as the custom is, was 

 proclaiming from a mosque tower that Mahomet was a true prophet, Tom, in the fury of 

 his zeal, and in the face of the whole city, told the priest he lied, and that his prophet 

 was an impostor ; and at a city called Mohan, in the East Indies, he, in public, disputed 

 with a Mahometan, who had called him Giaur, or infidel, in these words : " But I pray 

 thee, tell me, thou Mahometan ! dost thou, in sadness, call me Giaur? That I do, quoth 

 he. Then, quoth I, in very sober sadness, I retort that shameful word in thy throat ; 

 and tell thee plainly, that I am a Mussulman, and thou art a Giaur." He concludes 

 thus : "Go to then, thou false believer, since by thy injurious imputation laid on me, in 

 that thou calledst me Giaur, thou hast provoked me to speak thus. I pray thee, let this 

 mine answer be a warning for thee not to scandalise me in the like manner any more : 

 for the Christian religion, which I profess, is so dear and tender unto me, that neither 

 thou, nor any other Mahometan, shall, scot free, call me Giaur, but that I shall quit you 

 with an answer much to the wonder of those Mahometans. Dixi." He died of the flux, 

 occasioned by drinking sack at Surat, in 1617 : having published his European travels in 

 a quarto volume, which he called his Crudities : and to this circumstance the passage in 

 the text is a manifest allusion. See Athen. O.von. by Hliss, vol. ii. p. 208 ; Purchas's 

 Pi I prints, part i. book 4, chap. 17; Coriate's Letter Jront the Court of the Great 

 Mogul, 410, 1616 ; and, above all, Terry's Voyage, before cited, the author whereof was, 

 as he hhi.self asserts, his chamber-fellow, or tent-mate, in East India. H. 



