loo LITERATURE OF SEA AND RIVER FISHING. 



of whom are still alive and " plying the angle," it would be 

 beyond our original purpose to do much more than men- 

 tion some of their names and chief productions. During the 

 last twenty-five years many have been very active both 

 with their rods and pens, and it may be fairly said that 

 success has attended both their piscatory and literary 

 efforts. We need by no means be ashamed of the angling 

 literature of the last quarter of a century. Charles Kings- 

 ley, in his Chalk Stream Studies, which first appeared in 

 Erasers Magazine for September, 1858, shows us the kind 

 of man an angler can be, and the kind of angler a man 

 can be, as he also does in his Life and Letters, published 

 by his widow. The first named little book is a mine of 

 information to the fly-fisher, and charming reading in all 

 respects. The last quotation we shall indulge in is one of 

 his pictures of English scenery : — 



" Let the Londoner have his six weeks every year among crag 

 and heather, and return Avith lungs expanded and muscles braced 

 to his nine months' prison. The countryman, who needs no such 

 change of air and scene, will prefer more home-like though more 

 homely pleasures. Dearer to him than wild cataracts or Alpine 

 glens are the still hidden streams which Bewick has immortalized 

 in his vignettes, and Creswick in his pictures ; the long glassy 

 shadow, paved with yellow gravel, where he wades up between 

 low walls of fern-fringed rock, between nut and oak and alder, to 

 the low bar over which the stream comes swirling and dimpling, 

 as the water-ousel flits piping before him, and the murmur of the 

 ring-dove comes soft and sleepy through the wood. There, as he 

 wades, he sees a hundred sights, and hears a hundred tones, 

 which are hidden from the traveller on the dusty highway above. 

 The traveller fancies that he has seen the country. So he has, 

 the outside of it at least ; but the angler only sees the inside. The 

 angler only is brought close face to face with the flower and bird 

 and insect life of the rich river banks, the only part of the land- 

 scape where the hand of man has never interfered, and the only 



