172 PLUTARCH— CLEOPATRA— OPPIAN—ATHEN^EUS 



and slimmer, for fear lest if it catch a broad shadow, it might 

 move the doubt and suspicion that is naturally in fishes. 



" Moreover, the line they make not with many water knots " 

 (happy anglers !), " but desire to have it as plain and even 

 as possibly may be, without any roughness, for that this giveth 

 as it were some denuntiation unto them of fraud and deceit. 

 They take order likewise that the hairs which reach to the hook 

 should seem as white as possibly they can devise, for the whiter 

 they be the less are they seen in the water for their conformity 

 and likeness in colour to it." i 



We anglers seem of a verity " nae gleg at the uptak." 

 After some 1650 years we find John Whitney, in the preface to 

 The Genteel Recreation : or the Pleasure of Angling, ascribing 

 with modesty as to personal prowess, but quiet pride as to 

 discovery, his success very largely to the use of " fine Tackling " 

 which in the poem (!) he further, if in barbarous verse, enforces, 



" Fineness in Angling's th' Anglers nearest Rule : 

 For Prudence must still regulate in all." ^ 



The sentence in his Preface is apposite to many a Preface, 

 whether in prose or verse. " As to the verse there is fault and 

 folly enough, but grant Poetical License, if in pleasing nobody 

 I have pleased myself, and that's all the reward I desire," for 

 alas ! to many of us writers self-pleasing must be the sole 

 reward of our desert, if not of our desire. 



Misrepresentation as a despiser of fishing and fishermen 

 has clutched another victim. Dr. Johnson, of all people ! As 

 Plutarch has been branded for an opinion not his own, so Johnson 

 has been held guilty of the famous libel — " A worm at one end 

 and a fool at the other." The popular belief is all false. 

 According to Boswell, he was very appreciative — an attitude 

 not always Johnsonian — of Walton's work. 



Again, it was no other than he ^ who urged Moses Browne 

 to bring out in 1750 a new edition — the fifth and last was 



^ De Sol. Anim., 24. (Holland's Translation.) 



2 London, 1700. Dr. Turrell, op. cit., p. 157, believes Whitney to have 

 been the first to recommend the use of the floating fly — not for the purpose of 

 circumventing the wily trout, but to prevent the fly being gobbled by the 

 minnows. 



3 Cf. R. B. Marston, Walton and some Earlier Writers on Angling, 1894, an 

 informative and yet delightful volume. 



