"No life, my honest scholar, no life so happy, so pleasant, as the life of a well-governed angler; for while the lawyer is swallowed up with business, and the statesman is preventing or contriving plots, there we sit on cowslip banks, hear the birds sing, and possess ourselves in as much quietness, as these silent silver streams which we now see glide so quietly by us. Indeed, my good scholar, we may say of angling, as Dr. Botelar said of strawberries, -'Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did;' and so, if I might judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation, than angling.”—IZAAC WALTON. "I call a river enriched with inhabitants, where rocks are landlords, and trouts tenants. For here's not a stream but is furnished with trouts; I have angled them over from stem to stern; and dragged them forth, brace after brace, with nothing but a hackle, or an artificial fly adapted to the season and proportioned to the life. Humour but the fish and you have his life, and that's as much as you can promise yourself. Oh! the diversion I have had in these solitary streams! believe me, Theophilus, it surpasseth report. I remember on a time, when the clouds let fall some extravagant drops, which in a manner discoloured the face of the water; then it was among these stony cisterns, a little above that trembling stream, I have struck and killed many a brace of brave trouts; a reward beyond my labour and expense!"-FRANCKS. A.D. 1656. LONDON: Printed by A. SPOTTISWOODE, |