MUEJilNID^. 393 



All congers were not equally prized. Those from 

 Italy were in most request. Archestratus asserts that 

 these were as superior to all other as ' a plump thunny 

 to a vile coracinus.' Our personal experience being con- 

 fined to British conger, which is the nastiest viand we 

 ever attempted, the comparison, in the latter clause of 

 the affirmation, may be correct, but if so, it speaks the 

 flavour of a cor acinus to be transcendently vile. 



Though the conger of the Bay of Naples has received 

 honourable mention from Giannetazzio's Muse, it very 

 seldom occurs in the market, and neither ancient nor 

 modern E-ome seems at all to have shared in this sea- 

 eel enthusiasm of the Greeks ; Apicius committing it to 

 posterity with a single recipe. Our own ancestors, who 

 are known to have been coarse feeders generally, imi- 

 tated the Greeks in this particular propensity ; in Eng- 

 land, in the days of the early Henrys, or at any rate in 

 those of Elizabeth, this fish was esteemed royal fare, and 

 one of the reasons which Falstaff gives for the Prince lov- 

 ing Poins, is, his addiction to conger. ' He loves him,' says 

 he, ' because their legs are both of a bigness, and he plays 

 at quoits, and drinks off candle-ends tor flap-dragon, and 

 eats conger and fennel.' Doll Tear-sheet, in the same 

 play, calls the fat knight, in terms of bantering dispa- 

 ragement, 'a muddy conger;' but from the previous fa- 

 vourable mention of the fish, and from DoU Tear-sheet's 

 very presumable predilection for knights, the emphasis 

 here is clearly to be laid on the qualifying adjective, not 

 on the thing qualified. The term muddy conger (no bad 

 type, by the way, of a fat, greasy voluptuary) does not 

 throw any odium, nor is intended by the speaker to con- 

 vey any, upon clean congers or true knights ; but as that 

 first-rate fish the red mullet was sometimes 'lutarius,' 

 or mud-tainted, and tabooed the table ; so a conger-fan- 

 cier would view a conger in this predicament as a spoiled 

 specimen of a good fish; just as a diamond-merchant, 



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