many books on the same subject, devoted a certain amount of space to fishing.  But Markham gathered his materials in a rather shameless manner and his angling passages have little originality.  Thomas Barker’s The Art of Angling (1st ed., 1651) takes a more honourable position, and received warm commendation from Izaak Walton himself, who followed it in 1653 with The Compleat Angler.  So much has been written about this treasured classic that it is only necessary to indicate its popularity here by saying that its editions occupy some twenty pages in Bibliotheca Piscatoria (1883), and that since that work was published at least forty new editions have to be added to the list.  During Walton’s life-time the book ran through five editions, and with the fifth (1676) was incorporated Charles Cotton’s second part, the “instructions how to angle for a trout or grayling, in a clear stream.”  In some cases too there was added a third book, the fourth edition of The Experienced Angler, by Robert Venables (1st ed., 1662).  The three books together bore the title of The Universal Angler.  Venables’s portion was dropped later, but it is worth reading, and contained sound instruction though it has not the literary merit of Walton and Cotton.

A few other notable books of the century call for enumeration, The Gentleman’s Recreation by Nicholas Cox (1674), Gilbert’s The Angler’s Delight (1676), Chetham’s Vade-Mecum (1681), The Complete Troller by Robert Nobbes (1682), R. Franck’s Northern Memoirs (1694), and The True Art of Angling by J.S. (1696).  Of these Chetham, Nobbes, Franck and J.S. have the merit of considerable originality.  Franck has gained some notoriety by his round abuse of Walton.  In the 18th century among others we find The Secrets of Angling by C.G. (1705), Robert Hewlett’s The Angler’s Sure Guide (1706), The Whole Art of Fishing (1714), The Compleat Fisherman by James Saunders (1724), The Art of Angling by R. Brookes (1740), another book with the same title by R. and C. Bowlker (Worcester, c. 1750), The Complete Sportsman by Thomas Fairfax (c. 1760), The Angler’s Museum by T. Shirley (1784), and A Concise Treatise on the Art of Angling by Thomas Best (1787).  Of these only Saunders’s, Bowlker’s and Best’s books are of much importance, the rest being for the most part “borrowed.”  One volume of verse in the 18th century calls for notice, Moses Browne’s Piscatory Eclogues (1729).  Among greater names we get angling passages in Pope, Gay and Thomson; the two last were evidently brothers of the angle.