VALUE OF THE SALMON. 25 



too pure and gentle a pastime lor Lara ; and it would be 

 vain to reason with those who would take his authority, 

 whatever use or warning there may be in his example, 

 either as to what is cruel or what is coxcombical. Then 

 of course there is, as already mentioned, Dr. Johnson 

 with his sounding and senseless apophthegm (as he 

 doubtless called it) about " a stick and a string." But 

 he has utterly ruined his character as a witness by hav- 

 ing committed himself to the opinion that " the throne 

 of human felicity is a tavern chair." AVho can doubt 

 that the learned sage w^ould, as a writer, have been 

 much more natural and less made-up — mnch more of an 

 Englishman and less of an imitation Koman — had he 

 devoted to wandering on rivers' banks some of the time 

 he employed in sitting upon his throne of human felicity, 

 — had he listened more to the tongues that are in trees, 

 and oftener read the books that are in running brooks ? 



But leaving the many good men who have written 

 books expressly and solely in praise of the gentle art, 

 and the one or two questionable persons who have ven- 

 tured a remark on the other side of the dispute, look at 

 what a mass of testimony wc have in the frequent and 

 fond allusions of almost all our British poets. With the 

 already disposed-of exception of Byron, not one English 

 poet has one disrespectful allusion to the art ; while pas- 

 sages might be cited from almost all of them showing 

 that they loved, understood, and practised it. To begin 

 pretty near the beginning, Spenser draws so many com- 

 parisons and illustrations from the subject as to show 

 that, notwithstanding his poverty, his courtiership, and 

 his official and poetical labours, he had loitered by many 



