98 LIT ERA TURE OF SEA AND RIVER FISHING. 



Fisherman — delightful books of a high literary cast, inter- 

 spersed with much humour. The present writer often had 

 the pleasure of chatting with him when he was Vicar of 

 St. Mary Church, S. Devon, where he died. He was a 

 most charming raconteur especially of piscatory incidents. 

 Dr. Badham's Prose Halicnlics ; or Ancient and Modern 

 Fish Tattle, was welcomed by a very large number of 

 readers in 1854. It has been already mentioned as one of 

 the most interesting books of its kind ever written, and it 

 would be almost easier to say what there is not in it than 

 what there is, comprising as it does an almost endless 

 variety of chit-chat, and that, too, of the most learned kind 

 about fish and fishing. Dr. Badham is particularly " great " 

 on opsophagy. In the same year Robert Knox, M.D., who 

 affected to be a scientific naturalist and special authority 

 on Salmonoid biology, cannot be said to have added lustre 

 to angling literature by the publication of his FisJi, and Fish- 

 ing in the lone Glens of Scotland. Though, perhaps, hardly 

 deserving of the terrible lashing the book and its author get 

 at the hands of Mr. H. R. Francis ; still, for a writer who 

 lays down angling and ichthyological law in an offensively 

 authoritative manner, to muddle up together Salnio salar 

 and Salmo fario, to deny the Highlands the credit of 

 being an angling country, and to describe the Test as a 

 "quiet muddy stream," almost puts himself beyond the 

 pale of toleration. It is, however, but fair to the author to 

 say that there is a good deal of interesting reading in his 

 book, apart from its many blemishes. 



W. C. Siev;dL.r\!s Practical Angler ; or, the Art of T7'out 

 Fishing, is another of the books which no fly-fisherman 

 should leave unstudied. The first edition of the Practical 

 Angler appeared in 1857, and the last in 1877, five years 

 after the author's death. Mr. Stewart was known as one 



