122 PEOSB HALIEUTICS. 



prove the condition of his solids ; but as tawny Thames 

 has a pre-eminence amongst rirers for the quality of 

 its porter, so had tawny Tiber for the quality of its 

 basse. But here, agaLuj all were not equally famous. 

 The Tiber had its noted holes and haunts, and there 

 was one particular reach, often mentioned by Latin 

 writers, ' between the two bridges,'* whence all the finest 

 specimens used to be fetched : here they acquired that 

 delicate bouquet so appreciable to Roman connoisseurs, 

 who, according to Horace, knew at a bite whether what 

 their fishmonger had supplied had really come from this 

 site, or from some more distant bend of the river towards 

 Ostia. Many went so far as to ignore the existence of 

 this fish from any other stream. One egregious epicure 

 carried his impertiaence so far as actually to spit out a 

 mouthful of basse on his plate, at a country friend's 

 house, Tiith the laconic Beau-Brummelism to his host — 

 ' Peream ! nisi piscem putavi ' — ' Pardon me, but really 

 I thought it was fish ! ' Horace speaks in the same 

 flattering strain of intra-mural basse : ' hie Tiberinus ' 

 — as if nothing else that swam in the Tiber was fit to 

 compare with him ; and even LucUius — though he has 

 coined for this scavenger of sinks the new and appro- 

 priate name catUlot — hands him round at a Roman 



* At this very point — a sadly picturesque reach of the river it 

 is, looking upon a parched malarious wilderness, with nothing but 

 ruin and ruins around, in the way to the English cemetery — ^we 

 have often stopped to watch the perpetually revolving net used 

 in this fishery go round and round with the current, while some 

 pallid boatman, fit satellite to such a stream, has stood up feebly 

 in the tethered old boat, worn and wan as the Stygian ferryman 

 himself, ague in his veins, and no quinine in his pocket, eyeing the 

 ascending meshes, and putting forth a spectral arm to secure the 

 prey, a frittura of argentine (the Roman pearl-fish), oephali, alose 

 or smaJl basse, and then letting down the net again into the float- 

 ing feculence of the river, 



t ' Quod stercora circa ripas catillarent.' — Macr. 



