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 bon 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. 
