178 NA TURAL HISTORY OF SHAKESPEARE. 
Trinculo . What have we here ? A man 
or a fish ? Dead or alive ? A fish : he smells like 
a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of, 
not of the newest, Poor-John. 
The Tempest, Act ii. Scene 2. 
EEL. 
Moth. I will praise an eel with the same praise. 
Armado. What? that an eel is ingenious? 
Moth. That an eel is quick. 
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act i. Scene 2. 
Petrucio. Or is the adder better than the eel, 
Because his painted skin contents the eye ? 
Taming of the Shrew, Act iv. Scene 3. 
Bast. My arms such eel-skins stuff’d, 
King John, Act i. Scene 1. 
Falstajf. . . . you might have trussed him, 
and all his apparel, into an eel-skin ; 
King Henry IV., Part II. Act iii. Scene 2. 
Fool. Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the 
eels, when she put ’em i’ the paste alive; she knapp’d 
’em o’ the coxcombs with a stick, and cried, Down , 
wantons , down: ’twas her brother that, in pure kind¬ 
ness to his horse, butter’d his hay. 
King Lear, Act ii. Scene 4. 
PIKE. DACE. 
Falstajf. I the young dace be a bait for the old 
