VALUE OF THE SALMON. 27 



state of mind, and when man had not yet found out so 

 many inventions for their destruction. Pope, as appears 

 both from his poems and the testimony of contemporaries, 

 was an angler, but only, we fear, a pond and perch man 

 speaking enthusiastically of " eyeing the dancing cork 

 and bending reed." He evidently, however, knew well 

 the technicalities and nomenclature of the art, and in 

 his poem of " Windsor Forest" will be found the original 

 of the descriptive catalogue of fish which Smollet has 

 plagiarized in his " Ode to Leven Water." Dry den also 

 was an angler, and his contemporary Tom Durfey too, 

 and were jealous of each other on that as well as other 

 accounts, as we learn from Fenton : 



" By long experience Durfey may, no doubt, 

 Ensnare a gudgeon or sometimes a trout ; 

 Yet Dry den once exclaimed in partial spite, 

 ' He fish!' because the man attempts to write." 



To name only one more among the poets of that era, 

 Johnny Gay more than once makes a virtue of confess- 

 ing himself an angler, and describes the process of secur- 

 ing a " thumper," in a long and not very successful, but 

 eminently practical passage. Among poets of the pre- 

 sent generation, w T e name only the least likely of them 

 all, Wordsworth, whose lines descriptive of trout lying 

 on a blue slate would have shown him not destitute of 

 all taste and knowledge regarding this subject, even if we 

 had not Sir Humphry Davy's positive testimony that 

 the poet of the Lakes was " a lover both of fly-fishing 

 and fly-fishermen/' 



What other sport, we may now ask, is consecrated 

 by having been the subject of so much poetry and 

 the delight of so many poets '? None. Hunting 



