CARP-GOSSIP. 165 



commentators, not even Sir Harris Nicholas himself, 

 has ventured an opinion as to who this "Dr. T." was, 

 thus quoted by the renowned Izaak. But, in the 

 writer's humble opinion, there can be no doubt that he 

 was Dr. Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, a well-known 

 contemporary of Walton, having been physician to 

 James I., Charles I., and Charles II. He was equally 

 as famous as a cook as a physician, and the best 

 work on cookery, published in the seventeenth cen- 

 tury, under the grandiloquent title of Archimagirus 

 Anglo-Gallicus, was written by him ; and it contains 

 a very similar recipe for cooking carp to that given 

 in the Compleat Angler. It is most probable that 

 Turquet was, at least, an acquaintance of Walton, 

 having an equally genial happy temperament. Though 

 a noted Ion vivant, he attained the advanced age of 

 eighty-two years, and then ascribed the immediate 

 cause of his death to drinking bad wine at a convivial 

 meeting in a tavern in the Strand. " Good wine," he 

 used to say, " is slow poison ; I have been drinking 

 it all my lifetime, and it has not killed me yet ; but 

 bad wine is sudden death." 



W. P. 



