they read him, and that it reaches us too, though faintly.  Indeed, we have here ’a kind of picture of his own disposition,’ as he tells us Piscator is the Walton whom honest Nat. and R. Roe and Sir Henry Wotton knew on fishing-days.  The book is a set of confessions, without their commonly morbid turn.  ’I write not for money, but for pleasure,’ he says; methinks he drove no hard bargain with good Richard Marriott, nor was careful and troubled about royalties on his eighteenpenny book.  He regards scoffers as ‘an abomination to mankind,’ for indeed even Dr. Johnson, who, a century later, set Moses Browne on reprinting The Compleat Angler, broke his jest on our suffering tribe.  ‘Many grave, serious men pity anglers,’ says Auceps, and Venator styles them ‘patient men,’ as surely they have great need to be.  For our toil, like that of the husbandman, hangs on the weather that Heaven sends, and on the flies that have their birth or being from a kind of dew, and on the inscrutable caprice of fish; also, in England, on the miller, who giveth or withholdeth at his pleasure the very water that is our element.  The inquiring rustic who shambles up erect when we are lying low among the reeds, even he disposes of our fortunes, with whom, as with all men, we must be patient, dwelling ever—­

   ’With close-lipped Patience for our only friend,
   Sad Patience, too near neighbour of Despair.’

O the tangles, more than Gordian, of gut on a windy day!  O bitter east wind that bloweth down stream!  O the young ducks that, swimming between us and the trout, contend with him for the blue duns in their season!  O the hay grass behind us that entangles the hook!  O the rocky wall that breaks it, the boughs that catch it; the drought that leaves the salmon-stream dry, the floods that fill it with turbid, impossible waters!  Alas for the knot that breaks, and for the iron that bends; for the lost landing-net, and the gillie with the gaff that scrapes the fish!  Izaak believed that fish could hear; if they can, their vocabulary must be full of strange oaths, for all anglers are not patient men.  A malison on the trout that ‘bulge’ and ‘tail,’ on the salmon that ‘jiggers,’ or sulks, or lightly gambols over and under the line.  These things, and many more, we anglers endure meekly, being patient men, and a light world fleers at us for our very virtue.

Izaak, of course, justifies us by the example of the primitive Christians, and, in the manner of the age, drowns opposition in a flood of erudition, out of place, but never pedantic; futile, yet diverting; erroneous, but not dull.

‘God is said to have spoken to a fish, but never to a beast.’  There is a modern Greek phrase, ’By the first word of God, and the second of the fish.’  As for angling, ’it is somewhat like poetry:  men are to be born so’; and many are born to be both rhymers and anglers.  But, unlike many poets, the angler resembles ’the Adonis, or Darling of the Sea, so called because it is a loving and innocent fish,’ and a peaceful; ’and truly, I think most anglers are so disposed to most of mankind.’