170 PLUTARCH—CLEOPATRA—OPPIAN—ATHENAUS 
Holland translates the passage, ‘“‘for the cowardice, 
blockishness, stupidity, want of shifts and means in fishs, 
either offensive or defensive, causes the taking of them to be 
dishonest, discommendable, unlovely, and illiberal.” I subjoin « 
the Greek so that each reader may make his choice of or a 
translation of his own.! 
These words do, it is true, occur in Plutarch’s de Sol. 
Anim., 9. But the chapter merely gives a fanciful report 
of an imaginary debate before a jury empanelled to determine 
whether land or water animals are the more crafty. The words 
embody, not the opinion, matured or other, of the author, but 
one of the charges in the opening speech of Aristotimus, who 
appears on behalf of the superior sagacity of the terrestrials 
as against the aquatics. 
From a sentence in the mouth of a special pleader Plutarch 
has been branded for centuries, at any rate since the time of 
Burton’s book (1621), as the foe of fishing and the maligner of 
the craft. And with as much reason you might make Plato 
responsible for an opinion alien to his nature but advanced by 
one of his dialecticians, or saddle Father Izaak with some heresy 
of Venator’s. 
An attempt to account for so learned and on the whole so 
fair an author as Burton being led into a charge, the inaccuracy 
of which even cursory perusal of chapter nine evinces, may, 
if fishless, yet interest some of my readers. One of the blemishes 
ascribed to the Anatomy is the burdening of the text with too 
profuse quotations, ransacked from not only classical and 
patristic writers, but also (literally) from ‘‘ Jews, Turks, and 
Infidels.” 
Making full allowance for Burton’s encyclopedic knowledge, 
whence, and how, were these all amassed? Hearne, the 
Oxford historian, helps towards an answer in his statement that 
Mr. John Rouse, of Bodley’s Library, for many years provided 
his friend of Christ Church with choice books and quotations. 
Is it too much to surmise that the passages “‘ provided” by 
1 rh ydp ayerves kal aunxavoy ddws Kal dmdvoupyov a’tay alcxpby Kal &(ndrov Kal 
averciOepov Thy &ypav memolnxe. Holland’s Tvanslation, published in 1657, if only 
on account of its quaint turns is preferable to another published in the last 
century. 
