CHAPTER VI.
FISHES AND INSECTS.
The [Mermaid], as a sign, must have had great attractions for our forefathers. Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other dramatists, notice this taste for strange fishes. The ancient chronicles teem with captures of mermen, mermaids, and similar creatures. Old Hollinshed gives a detailed account of a merman caught at Orford, in Suffolk, in the reign of King John. He was kept alive on raw meal and fish for six months, but at last “fledde secretelye to the sea, and was neuer after seene nor heard off.” Another chronicler says, “About this time [1202] fishes of strange shapes were taken, armed with helmets and shields like armed men, only they were much bigger.” And Gervase of Tilbury roundly asserts that mermen and mermaids live in the British Ocean. Even in more modern times, every now and then a mermaid (the mermen seem to have been more scarce) made her appearance. In an advertisement at the beginning of the seventeenth century, we find:—
“IN Bell Yard, on Ludgate Hill, is to be seen, at any hour of the day, a living Mermaid, from the waist upwards of a party colour, from thence downwards is very strange and wonderful.
Mulier formosa superne
Desinit in piscem.”
After which follows a most promising and tempting little bit of information in French:—“Son corps est de divers couleurs avec beaucoup d’autres curiosités qu’on ne peut exprimer.” Again, in 1747:—
“We hear from the north of Scotland, that some time this month a sea creature, known by the name of Mermaid, which has the shape of a human body from the trunk upwards, but below is wholly fish, was carried some miles up the water of Devron.”[316]
In 1824, a mermaid or merman (for the sex was discreetly left in dubio) made its appearance before “an enlightened public,” when, as the papers inform us, “upwards of 150 distinguished fashionables” went to see it. At Bartholomew Fair, in 1830, a stuffed mermaid was exhibited; but if once she had been such a “mulier formosa” as captivated the ancient mariners, she was certainly much altered.[317] A very different specimen had been exhibited in Fleet Street in 1822; but she disappeared all at once most mysteriously, not, however, without a rumour of her being under the protection of the Lord Chancellor, which, as she was a comely maiden with flaxen hair, “mulier superne et inferne,” lies within the range of possibilities. The sea-serpent has now almost done away with the mermaid; yet, as late as 1857, there appeared an article in the Shipping Gazette, under the intelligence of 4th June, signed by some Scotch sailors, and describing an object seen off the North British coast, “in the shape of a woman, with full breast, dark complexion, comely face,” and the rest.
At one time it appears to have been a very common sign, if we may judge from the way in which it is mentioned by Brathwait in his New Cast of Characters, (1631):—
“If she [the hostess] aspire to the conceit of a sine and device, her birch pole pull’d downe, he will supply her with one, which he performes so poorely as none that sees it, but would take it for a sign he was drunk when he made it. A long consultation is had before they can agree what sign must be reared. ‘A meere-mayde’ says she, ‘for she will sing catches to the youths of the parish.’ ‘A lyon,’ says he, for that is the onely sign he can make; and this he formes so artlessly, as it requires his expression, this is a lyon. Which old Ellenor Rumming, his tapdame, denies, saying it should have been a meere-mayde.”
Among the most celebrated of the Mermaid taverns in London, that in Bread Street stands foremost. As early as the fifteenth century, it was one of the haunts of the pleasure-seeking Sir John Howard, whose trusty steward records, anno 1464:—“Paid for wyn at the Mermayd in Bred Stret, for my mastyr and Syr Nicholas Latimer, x d. ob.” In 1603, Sir Walter Raleigh established a literary club in this house, doubtless the first in England. Amongst its members were Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Selden, Carew, Martin, Donne, Cotton, &c. It is frequently alluded to by Beaumont and Fletcher in their comedies, but best known is that quotation from a letter of Beaumont to Ben Jonson:—