186 SOME WRITERS ON THE GENTLE CRAFT 



help him in each and all of the localities he is likely to 

 visit, and through every season of the year ; while for 

 clearness and simplicity, Mr. Colquhoun is as little 

 given to multiply rules and instructions pharisaically 

 as to embarrass himself with an over-elaborate apparatus. 

 Two or three coils of flies wound round his hat, and 

 composed, of course, like French salad, " after the 

 season/' and according to his ample knowledge and 

 experience, serve his turn for any day's angling. He 

 is none of your brilliant theorists and connoisseurs, 

 who have collected, to their own extreme confusion, 

 whole libraries of fishing-books, stuffed with fur, 

 feathers, and tinsel ; while you are perpetually coming, 

 in his pages, upon one of those practical maxims that 

 may spare infinite disappointment to the sensible 

 novice, and set him up with the best second-hand 

 experience. Those passages might be extracted with 

 advantage, and codified, in the shape of a summary, 

 in the Appendix ; and we may select a few of them, 

 by way of example. Angling, says Mr. Colquhoun, 

 though not precisely in these words, is emphatically a 

 science that must be cultivated by thought and observa- 

 tion, and practised by the exercise of careful induction. 



" It is the exact perception of the seats of fish, and where they 

 may shift about, according to the varying moods of the river, that 

 constitutes half the science of angling. As the late eminent Dr. 

 Munro used to say of medicine, ' It is but shrewd guessing after 

 all.' Nevertheless, as in physic, the shrewdest guesser is the best 

 physician ; so in angling, the shrewdest guesser, if not always the 

 ablest, will go far to be the most successful fisher. ... As to up- 

 stream trouting, many will reject it on account of the perpetual 



