BRITISH SPORT PAST AND PRESENT 



have, in this very river that runs by us, in three or four hours 

 taken thirty, thirty-five and forty of the best Trouts in the 

 river.' 



Had Cotton's ideas of legitimate fishing been as those of a 

 later day he might have cast a dubious eye upon the principles 

 of his ' father Walton ' who held that ' fishing with a dead rod, 

 and laying night hooks, are like putting money to use ; for they 

 both work for their owners when they do nothing but sleep, or 

 eat or rejoice as you know we have done this last hour.' And 

 while upon this subject of methods now held unlawful it may 

 be recalled that Mr. Thomas Barker was the discoverer of the 

 deadly nature of salmon-roe ; which secret he kept to himself, 

 greatly sorrowing that he had not possessed it twenty years 

 earlier ; for then ' I would have gained a hundred pounds onely 

 with this bait.' 



Which reticence on Barker's part invites the reflection 

 that the love of seventeenth-century anglers one for another, 

 insisted upon by Walton, even as the affection among them 

 of a later day, stopped short of disclosures relating to craft 

 secrets. 



This is from one of Charles Kingsley's Chalk Stream 

 Studies :''... Now we will walk down the meadows some 

 half mile, 



" While all the land in flowery squares. 

 Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind 

 Smells of the coming summer," 



to a scene, which, as we may find its antitype anywhere 

 for miles round, we may boldly invent for ourselves. A red 

 brick mill (not new red brick, of course) shall hum for ever 

 below giant poplar-spires, which bend and shiver in the 

 steady breeze. On its lawn laburnums shall feather down like 

 ' dropping wells of fire,' and from under them the stream shall 

 hurry leaping and laughing into the light, and spread at our 

 feet into a broad bright shallow, in which the kine are standing 



' Fraser's Magazine, 1858. 



186 



