“Messieurs, je suis pêcheur, et pêcheur de la ligne, J’en fait ici l’aveu. Ce cas semble peu digne De vos graves esprits: car on l’a dit souvent La ligne, avec sa canne, c’est un long instrument Dont le plus mince bout tient un petit reptile, Et dont l’autre est tenu par un grand imbécile!”
“These lines were written by Guyet, who if he were Martial Guyet died nearly one hundred years before the great lexicographer was born.”[399] Even before Guyet the libel seems to have become hackneyed, “car on l’a dit souvent.”
Plutarch’s works figure so frequently in these pages that I will not here specially dwell on or quote from them, except “once more the tale to tell” of Antony and Cleopatra’s fishing as given in his Life of Antony, 29, 2.
Antony (who “fishes, drinks, and wastes the lamps of night in revel”), when with Cleopatra on the Nile had, of course, if Beaumont and Fletcher’s lines hold, not been half as successful as his mistress:
“She was used to take delight, with her fair hand To angle in the Nile, where the glad fish, As if they knew who ’twas sought to deceive them, Contended to be taken.”[400]
To shine in her eyes, he secretly commanded his diver to attach fish to his hook. Cleopatra, becoming aware of the trick, signalled her diver to go down (or as some others relate, bribed Antony’s own servants) to affix to his hook, a salted fish (τάριχος). This he promptly struck and hauled out mid laughter and ridicule. “Leave,” cried Cleopatra, “leave the fishing rod to us; your game is Cities, Provinces, and Kingdoms.”[401]
Shakespeare makes Cleopatra’s diver attach the salted fish:
“Cleo: Give me mine angle, we’ll to the river: there, My music playing far off, I will betray Tawny finn’d fishes; my bended hook shall pierce Their slimy jaws, and as I draw them up, I’ll think them every one an Antony, And say ‘Ah, ha! you’re caught.’
“Charmian:’Twas merry when You wager’d on your angling; when your diver Did hang a salt-fish on his hook, which he With fervency drew up.
“Cleo:That time!—O times!— I laughed him out of patience, and that night I laugh’d him into patience; and next morn, Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed.”