THE COMPLETE ANGLER. 251 



Piscator. You see you are betrayed into it, but it shall be in 

 order to something that will make amends : and it is but an ill 

 mile or two out of your way. 



Viator. I believe all things, sir, and doubt nothing. Is this 

 your beloved river Dove ? It is clear and swift indeed, but a 

 very little one. 



Piscator. You see it here at the worst : we shall come to it 

 anon again, after two miles riding, and so near as to lie upon 

 the very banks. 



Viator. Would we were there once : but I hope we have no 

 more of these Alps to pass over. 



Piscator. No, no, sir, only this ascent before you, which you 

 see is not very uneasy, and then you will no more quarrel with 

 your way. 



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, * 



* Tom Coriate lived in the reign of King- James the First, and, as 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 number- 

 less. He travelled almos*" over Europe on foot, and, in that tour, walked 

 nine hundred 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 two- 

 pence sterling a-day ; and of that three pounds he elsewhere says, he was 

 ,cozdfced 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 pro- 

 nounced 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 undertake 

 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 Vouage to East India, by Edward 

 Terry, chaplain to Sir Thomas Row, ambassador to the Great Mogul, 

 12mo. 1655. 



Farther, 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, 

 m 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 

 Moltan, 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 he, "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: " Goto, then, thou false 

 believer! since, by thy injurious imputat'on laid on me, in that thou callest 

 me Giaur, thou hast provoked me to speak thus. I pray thpe, let this mine 

 answer be a warning for thee not to scandalize me in the like manner any 

 more; for the Christian religion, which 1 profess, is iO dear and tender 



