Fishes of the Angle. 125 



exceedeth that of Trent ; " * and this creature may, therefore, 

 lay fair claim to the honour of being a " time-honoured " 

 dish, and its excellence a maxim of old prescription. (What 

 fanatics the Greeks and Romans were about "the holy 

 eel, Boeotian goddesses all clothed in beet ! " They called it 

 " the white-armed goddess " and " the Helen of the dinner- 

 table. " But the Egyptians went even further, for they not only 

 adored them as food but formally worshipped them. None 

 the less the natural history of the eel puzzled the ancients 2 

 vastly, and the theory that satisfied them best was that the 

 creature was the spontaneous outcome of river-mud.) 



The "disrelished" flounder "smooth and flat;" the spotted 

 grayling " basking between the shadows " (Jean Ingelow), 

 " whose great spawn is big as any pease " (Drayton). 



"To smell daintily as a flower or a fish" has been 

 accepted by our forefathers as an allowable simile. One 

 angler says the smelt has a fragrance of lavender ; another 

 that it savours of cucumber - } another that the grayling has 

 the aroma of thyme. St. Ambrose called it -the "sweet- 

 flower of fishes." (The cuttlefish was supposed "with its 

 sweet odour" to attract fish to it ; and the whale too obtained 

 its food by opening its mouth, whence issued " so agreeable 

 a scent" that the creatures of the deep gathered together in 

 its jaws to enjoy the fragrant atmosphere. As a general rule 

 too, the smell of fish cooking is considered rather worse 

 than that offish raw : yet, says an Athenian enthusiast, " the 



1 " Your Ulster eels," says Laud to Strafford (in Stafford's letters), " are 

 the fattest and fairest I ever saw." 



2 Compare Pope's 



" Silver eel in shining volumes rolled, 

 And yellow carp in scales bedropped with gold ; " 



with Jenyns' 



' ' Here the bright silver eel enrolled 

 In shining volume lies, 

 There basks the carp bedropt with gold." 



