“The pleasant’st angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait,”
and that it would be difficult to illustrate a work on angling with quotations from his writings, the Rev. H. N. Ellacombe, in his interesting papers[925] on “Shakespeare as an Angler,” has not only shown the strong probability that he was a lover of this sport, but further adds, that “he may be claimed as the first English poet that wrote of angling with any freedom; and there can be little doubt that he would not have done so if the subject had not been very familiar to him—so familiar, that he could scarcely write without dropping the little hints and unconscious expressions which prove that the subject was not only familiar, but full of pleasant memories to him.” His allusions, however, to the folk-lore associated with fishes are very few; but the two or three popular notions and proverbial sayings which he has quoted in connection with them help to embellish this part of our subject.
Carp. This fish was, proverbially, the most cunning of fishes, and so “Polonius’s comparison of his own worldly-wise deceit to the craft required for catching a carp” is most apt (“Hamlet,” ii. 1):[926]
“See you now;
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth.”
This notion is founded on fact, the brain of the carp being six times as large as the average brain of other fishes.
Cockle. The badge of a pilgrim was, formerly, a cockle-shell, which was worn usually in the front of the hat. “The habit,” we are told,[927] “being sacred, this served as a protection, and therefore was often assumed as a disguise.” The escalop was sometimes used, and either of them was considered as an emblem of the pilgrim’s intention to go beyond the sea. Thus, in Ophelia’s ballad (“Hamlet,” iv. 5, song), the lover is to be known:
“By his cockle hat and staff,
And his sandal shoon.”
In Peele’s “Old Wives’ Tale,” 1595, we read, “I will give thee a palmer’s staff of ivory, and a scallop-shell of beaten gold.” Nares, too, quotes from Green’s “Never Too Late” an account of the pilgrim’s dress:
“A hat of straw, like to a swain,
Shelter for the sun and rain,
With a scallop-shell before.”
Cuttle. A foul-mouthed fellow was so called, says Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps,[928] because this fish is said to throw out of its mouth, upon certain occasions, an inky and black juice that fouls the water; and, as an illustration of its use in this sense, he quotes Doll Tearsheet’s words to Pistol, “2 Henry IV.” ii. 4: “By this wine, I’ll thrust my knife in your mouldy chaps, an you play the saucy cuttle with me.” Dyce says that the context would seem to imply that the term is equivalent to “culter, swaggerer, bully.”[929]