but not, like the Moon, the story of “the birth” of their error. Inevitably in their pages crop up Burton’s words, “Plutarch, in his book _De Sol. Anim._, speaks against all fishing as a filthy, base, illiberal employment, having neither wit nor perspicacity in it, nor worth the labour.”[392] Holland translates the passage, “for the cowardice, blockishness, stupidity, want of shifts and means in fishes, either offensive or defensive, causes the taking of them to be dishonest, discommendable, unlovely, and illiberal.” I subjoin the Greek so that each reader may make his choice of or a translation of his own.[393] These words do, it is true, occur in Plutarch’s _de Sol. Anim._, 9. But the chapter merely gives a fanciful report of an imaginary debate before a jury empanelled to determine whether land or water animals are the more crafty. The words embody, not the opinion, matured or other, of the author, but one of the charges in the opening speech of Aristotimus, who appears on behalf of the superior sagacity of the terrestrials as against the aquatics. From a sentence in the mouth of a special pleader Plutarch has been branded for centuries, at any rate since the time of Burton’s book (1621), as the foe of fishing and the maligner of the craft. And with as much reason you might make Plato responsible for an opinion alien to his nature but advanced by one of his dialecticians, or saddle Father Izaak with some heresy of Venator’s. An attempt to account for so learned and on the whole so fair an author as Burton being led into a charge, the inaccuracy of which even cursory perusal of chapter nine evinces, may, if fishless, yet interest some of my readers. One of the blemishes ascribed to the _Anatomy_ is the burdening of the text with too profuse quotations, ransacked from not only classical and patristic writers, but also (literally) from “Jews, Turks, and Infidels.” Making full allowance for Burton’s encyclopædic knowledge, whence, and how, were these all amassed? Hearne, the Oxford historian, helps towards an answer in his statement that Mr. John Rouse, of Bodley’s Library, for many years provided his friend of Christ Church with choice books and quotations. Is it too much to surmise that the passages “provided” by the helpful service of Rouse[394]—a trait fortunately still characteristic of his Bodley successors—included the sentence of damnation, which, even if verified, was, from being torn out of its context, certainly misunderstood and ill-digested?