AUTHORS ON SEA AND RIVER FISHING. 575 



The nine chapters (162 pages), of which the book is com- 

 posed, elaborate the idea with tedious simile and allegory. 

 Hone, in his Year Book gives several extracts from it. 

 There are only two known copies of the work, the one in the 

 Bodleian, and the other in Mr. Huth's collection. A tran- 

 script, prepared for republication, was made by the Rev. 

 H. S. Cotton, and is now in the Denison collection. The 

 author was himself "a lover of the angle." In 1609 we 

 have Dr. Rawlinson's sermon Fishermen Fishers of Men 

 preached at Mercer's Chapel. Quaintly enough observes 

 the worthy doctor : 



" Very likely, that while I thus launch forth into the deepe and 

 cast my nette upon the face of the waters, it will fare with me 

 as with other fishermen, who, among many fish, meet with some 

 carps, and if by chance they alight upon a sturdy jack, there is 

 great tug betwixt them, whether thev shall catch the jack or the 

 jack them." 



And further on, 



" It is fabled by the poet (Ovid, Met. iii. 8) that Bacchus began 

 his empire by the transmutation of mariners into fishes. So doth 

 Christ, the true Bacchus, bis genitus (God of the substance of 

 His Father begotten before the world, and Man of the substance 

 of His Mother, borne in the world), begin His Kingdome, even 

 the Kingdome of His Gospel, with the metamorphising of men into 

 fishes, yet doth He not either transubstantiate them into fishes, like 

 those mariners, or ingulfe them into the bellie of a fish, like Jonas, 

 or make them fish the one halfe, flesh the other, like Myrmaides 



' Ut turpiter atrum 

 Desinat in piscetn mulier formosa superne.' 



But herein will He have them to symbolize with fishes, that as 

 fishes are caught lineis textis, with a net of twisted lines, so must 

 they be lineis ex Scriptura contextis with the net of God's Word 

 made out of lines taken out of the Scripture." 



Several other divines followed in the same groove, 



