Such the amusement of your hours, While the season aids your powers; Nor shall my friend a single day Ere pass without a line away. Nor these alone your honours bound, The tricks experience has found; Sublimer theory lifts your name Above the fisher's simple fame, And in the practice you excel Of what none else can teach as well, Wielding at once with equal skill The useful powers of either quill. With all that winning grace of style, What else were tedious, to beguile, A second Oppian, you impart The secrets of the angling art; Each fish's nature, and how best To fit the bait to every taste, Till in the scholar that you train, The accomplish'd master lives again And yet your pen aspires above The maxims of the art you love; Though virtues, faintly taught by rule, Are better learn'd in angling's school, Where Temperance, that drinks the rill, And Patience, sovereign over ill, By many an active lesson bought, Refine the soul, and steel the thought. Far higher truths you love to start, To train us to a nobler art, And in the lives of good men give That chiefest lesson, how to live;

While Hooker, philosophic sage,
Becomes the wonder of your page,
Or while we see combin'd in one
The Wit and the Divine in Donne :
Or while the Poet and the Priest,
In Herbert's sainted form confest,
Unfold the temple's holy maze
That awes and yet invites our gaze:
Worthies these of pious name,
From your pourtraying pencil claim
A second life, and strike anew
With fond delight the admiring view.
And thus at once the peopled brook
Submits its captives to your hook;
And we, the wiser sons of men,
Yield to the magic of your pen,

While angling on some streamlet's brink,
The muse and you combine to think.

In this volume of the Complete Angler, which will be always read with avidity, even by those who entertain no strong relish for the art which it professes to teach, we discover a copious vein of innocent pleasantry and good humour. The scenes descriptive of rural life are inimitably beautiful. How artless and unadorned is the language! The dialogue is diversified with all the characteristic beauties of colloquial composition; and the songs and little poems which are occasionally inserted, will abundantly gratify the reader, who has a taste for the charms of pastoral poesy. And, above all, those lovely lessons of religious and moral instruction, which are so repeatedly inculcated through

Being a Difcourfe of FISH and FISHING, Not unworthy the perufal of moft Anglers. Simon Peter faid, Igo a fifbing and they faid.We alfo wil go with thee. John 21.3.

London,Printed by T.Maxey for Rich: MARRIOT, in S.Dunftans Church-Yard, Fleet street.1653.

out the whole work, will ever recommend this exquisitely pleasing performance. It was first printed in 1653, with an appropriately decorated title; and the fish alluded to in the work were engraved in the most beautiful manner, it is believed, on steel plates, by Lombart. The work became so generally read as to pass through five editions during the life of the author. The second edition is dated in 1655, the third in 1661'; and

9 I venture to quote the following beautiful passage:"Content will never dwell but in a meek and quiet soul: and this may appear, if we read and consider what our Saviour says in St. Matthew's Gospel ; for there he says, ' Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy; blessed be the pure in heart, for they shall see God; blessed be the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God; and blessed be the meek, for they shall possess the earth." Not that the meek shall not also obtain mercy, and see God, and be comforted, and at last come to the kingdom of heaven; but in the mean time he, and he only possesses the earth as he goes towards that kingdom of heaven, by being humble and cheerful, and content with what his good God has allotted him. He has no turbulent, repining, vexatious thoughts, that he deserves better; nor is vexed when he sees others possessed of more honour, or more riches than his wise God has allotted for his share: but he possesses what he has with a meek and contented quietness, such a quietness as makes his very dreams pleasing both to God and himself.-Complete Angler, 1676, 12mo. p. 265-6.

Some copies of this edition will be found dated 1664, but the third edition was certainly printed in 1661.—ED.