Tickling for Trout. 
353 
hardest gravel; and that he may justly contend with all fresh-water 
lish; as the mullett may with all sea-fish, for precedency and dainti¬ 
ness of taste; and that being in right season, the most dainty palates 
have allowed precedency to him.” (Part 1, ch. 4.) 
Drayton also gives the trout the first place among 
fish :— 
“ The trout by nature mark’d with many a crimson spot, 
As though she curious were in him above the rest, 
And of fresh-water fish, did note him for the best.” 
(Polydilion , song xxvi.) 
Muffett writes 
“ Trouts are so great in Northumberland, that they seem thicker then 
salmons, and are therefore called bull-trouts; there are especially two 
sorts of them, red trouts resembling little fresh-water salmon, and 
therefore termed salmon-trouts ; and gray trouts or skurffs, which keep 
not in the chanel of bournes or rivers, but lurk like the alderlings 
under the roots of great alders.” (Page 188.) 
Alderlings, this author explains— 
“ are a kind of fish betwixt a trout and a grayling, scaled (as the trout 
is not) but not so great scaled as the grading is ; it lyethever in a deep 
water, under some old and great alder.” (Page 175.) 
The device of tickling trout was not unknown to 
Shakspeare : “ Here comes the trout that must be caught 
with tickling,” cries Maria (Tivelfth Night , ii. 5, 24). Also 
to Beaumont and Fletcher— 
“ He is mine own, I have him ; 
I told thee I would tickle him like a trout.” 
( Rule a Wife and have a Wife , act ii.) 
The Char was a very local fish. According to Camden 
it was only taken in one of the English 
, , Char. 
lakes 
" For, among these mountaines the greatest standing water in all 
England, now called Winander-mere, lieth streatched out for the space 
of tenne miles or there about with crooked bankes, and is all paved, 
2 A 
