The best anglers in the world are those who do not catch fish; the mere slaughter of fish is simply brutal, and it was with a view to keeping her excellent treatise out of the hands of the idle and the inappreciative that Dame Berners incorporated that treatise in a compendious book whose cost was so large that only ``gentyll and noble men’’ could possess it.  What mind has he who loveth fishing merely for the killing it involves—­what mind has such a one to the beauty of the ever-changing panorama which nature unfolds to the appreciative eye, or what communion has he with those sweet and uplifting influences in which the meadows, the hillsides, the glades, the dells, the forests, and the marshes abound?

Out upon these vandals, I say—­out upon the barbarians who would rob angling of its poesy, and reduce it to the level of the butcher’s trade!  It becomes a base and vicious avocation, does angling, when it ceases to be what Sir Henry Wotton loved to call it—­``an employment for his idle time, which was then not idly spent; a rest to his mind, a cheerer of his spirits, a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness, and a begetter of habits of peace and patience in those that professed and practised it!’’

There was another man I should like to have met—­Sir Henry Wotton; for he was an ideal angler.  Christopher North, too (``an excellent angler and now with God’’!)—­how I should love to have explored the Yarrow with him, for he was a man of vast soul, vast learning, and vast wit.

``Would you believe it, my dear Shepherd,’’ said he, ``that my piscatory passions are almost dead within me, and I like now to saunter along the banks and braes, eying the younkers angling, or to lay me down on some sunny spot, and with my face up to heaven, watch the slow-changing clouds!’’

There was the angling genius with whom I would fain go angling!

``Angling,’’ says our revered St. Izaak, ``angling is somewhat like poetry—­men are to be born so.’’

Doubtless there are poets who are not anglers, but doubtless there never was an angler who was not also a poet.  Christopher North was a famous fisherman; he began his career as such when he was a child of three years.  With his thread line and bent-pin hook the wee tot set out to make his first cast in ``a wee burnie’’ he had discovered near his home.  He caught his fish, too, and for the rest of the day he carried the miserable little specimen about on a plate, exhibiting it triumphantly.  With that first experience began a life which I am fain to regard as one glorious song in praise of the beauty and the beneficence of nature.

My bookseller once took me angling with him in a Wisconsin lake which was the property of a club of anglers to which my friend belonged.  As we were to be absent several days I carried along a box of books, for I esteem appropriate reading to be a most important adjunct to an angling expedition.  My bookseller had with him enough machinery to stock a whaling expedition, and I could not help wondering what my old Walton would think, could he drop down into our company with his modest equipment of hooks, flies, and gentles.