200 THE COMPLETE ANGLER. 



CHAPTER XIX. 



OF SEVERAL RIVERS, AND SOME OBSERVATIONS OF FISH. 



Piscator. WELL, scholar, since the ways and weather do both 

 favour us, and that yet we see not Tottenham- Cross, you shall see 

 my willingness to satisfy your desire. And, first, for the rivers 

 of this nation ; there be, as you may note out of Dr Heylin's 

 Geography, and others, in number three hundred and twenty- 

 five; but those of chiefest note he reckons and describes as 

 followeth : 



The chief is Thamisis, compounded of two rivers, Thame and 

 Isis ; whereof the former, rising somewhat beyond Thame, in 

 Buckinghamshire, and the latter near Cirencester in Glouces- 

 tershire, meet together about Dorchester in Oxfordshire ; the 

 issue of which happy conjunction is the Thamisis, or Thames ; 

 hence it flieth betwixt Berks, Buckinghamshire, Middlesex, 

 Surrey, Kent, and Essex; and so weddeth himself to the 

 Kentish Medvvay, in the very jaws of the ocean. This glorious 

 river feeleth the violence and benefit of the sea more than any 

 river in Europe ; ebbing and flowing, twice a-day, more than 

 sixty miles ; about whose banks are so many fair towns and 

 princely palaces, that a German poet thus truly spake : * 



Tot campos, &c. 



We saw so many woods and princely bowers, 

 Sweet fields, brave palaces, and stately towers, 

 So many gardens dress'd with curious care, 

 That Thames with royal Tiber may compare. 



2. The second river of note is Sabrina, or Severn: it hath its 

 beginning in Plynlimmon hill, in Montgomeryshire ; and his end 

 seven miles from Bristol ; washing, in the mean space, the 

 walls of Shrewsbury, Worcester, and Gloucester, and divers 

 other places and palaces of note. 



3. Trent, so called for thirty kind of fishes that are found 

 in it, or for that it receiveth thirty lesser rivers ; who, having 

 its fountain in Staffordshire, and gliding through the counties of 

 Nottingham, Lincoln, Leicester, and York, augmenteth the 

 turbulent current of Humber, the most violent stream of all 

 the isle. This Humber is not, to say truth, a distinct river 

 having a spring-head of its own, but it is rather the mouth or 



* Who this German poet was I cannot find, but the verses, in the ori- 

 ginal Latin, are in Heylin's Cosmography, page 240, and are as follow : 

 Tot campos sylvas, tot regia tecta, tot nortoi, 

 Artifici excultos dextra, tot vidimus arces ; 

 Ut mine Ausonio, Thamisis, cum Tibride certet 



