and, of course, in heavy water, in Scotland, this is all very well.  But none of the old anglers, to my knowledge, was a dry-fly fisher, and Izaak was no fly-fisher at all.  He took what he said from Mascall, who took it from the old Treatise, in which, it is probable, Walton read, and followed the pleasant and to him congenial spirit of the mediaeval angler.  All these writers tooled with huge rods, fifteen or eighteen feet in length, and Izaak had apparently never used a reel.  For salmon, he says, ’some use a wheel about the middle of their rods or near their hand, which is to be observed better by seeing one of them, than by a large demonstration of words.’

Mr. Westwood has made a catalogue of books cited by Walton in his Compleat Angler.  There is AElian (who makes the first known reference to fly-fishing); Aldrovandus, De Piscibus (1638); Dubravius, De Piscibus (1559); and the English translation (1599) Gerard’s Herball (1633); Gesner, De Piscibus (s.a.) and Historia Naturalis (1558); Phil.  Holland’s Pliny (1601); Rondelet, De Piscibus Marines (1554); Silvianus Aquatilium Historiae (1554):  these nearly exhaust Walton’s supply of authorities in natural history.  He was devoted, as we saw, to authority, and had a childlike faith in the fantastic theories which date from Pliny.  ’Pliny hath an opinion that many flies have their birth, or being, from a dew that in the spring falls upon the leaves of trees.’  It is a pious opinion!  Izaak is hardly so superstitious as the author of The Angler’s Vade Mecum.  I cannot imagine him taking ’Man’s fat and cat’s fat, of each half an ounce, mummy finely powdered, three drains,’ and a number of other abominations, to ’make an Oyntment according to Art, and when you Angle, anoint 8 inches of the line next the Hook therewith.’  Or, ’Take the Bones and Scull of a Dead-man, at the opening of a Grave, and beat the same into Pouder, and put of this Pouder in the Moss wherein you keep your Worms,—­but others like Grave Earth as well.’  No doubt grave earth is quite as efficacious.

These remarks show how Izaak was equipped in books and in practical information:  it follows that his book is to be read, not for instruction, but for human pleasure.

So much for what Walton owed to others.  For all the rest, for what has made him the favourite of schoolboys and sages, of poets and philosophers, he is indebted to none but his Maker and his genius.  That he was a lover of Montaigne we know; and, had Montaigne been a fisher, he might have written somewhat like Izaak, but without the piety, the perfume, and the charm.  There are authors whose living voices, if we know them in the flesh, we seem to hear in our ears as we peruse their works.  Of such was Mr. Jowett, sometime Master of Balliol College, a good man, now with God.  It has ever seemed to me that friends of Walton must thus have heard his voice as