THE COMPLETE ANGLER 53 



worldly trouble ; both harmlessly, and in a recreation 

 that became a churchman. And this good man was well 

 content, if not desirous, that posterity should know he 

 was an angler ; as may appear by his picture, now to be 

 seen, and carefully kept, in Brazen-nose College ; to 

 which he was a liberal benefactor. In which picture he 

 was drawn, leaning on a desk, with his Bible before him, 

 and on one hand of him his lines, hooks, and other tackling 

 lying in a round : and on his other hand are his angle-rods 

 of several sorts : and by them this is written, " That he 

 died 13 Feb. 1601, being aged 95 years, 44 of which, he 

 had been Dean of St. Paul's Church ; and that his age had 

 neither impaired his hearing, nor dimmed his eyes, nor 

 weakened his memory, nor made any of the faculties of 

 his mind weak or useless." 'Tis said, that angling and 

 temperance * were great causes of these blessings, and I 

 wish the like to all that imitate him, and love the memory 

 of so good a man. 



My next and last example, shall be that under-valuer 

 of money, the late provost of Eton College, Sir Henry 

 Wotton a man with whom I have often fished and con- 

 versed, a man whose foreign employments in the service 

 of this nation, and whose experience, learning, wit, and 

 cheerfulness, made his company to be esteemed one of 

 the delights of mankind : this man, whose very approba- 

 tion of angling were sufficient to convince any modest 

 censurer of it, this man was also a most dear lover, and a 

 frequent practiser of the art of angling ; of which he 

 would say, " Twas an employment for his idle time, 



* It would appear, that though reputed temperate, he was by no 

 means a teetotaller ; for Sir J. Hawkins says, " that Fuller, in his 

 Worthies (Lancashire, p. 115), has thought it worth recording of this 

 pious and learned divine, and that in language so very quaint as to 

 be but just intelligible, that he was accustomed to fish in the Thames ; 

 and having one day left his bottle of ale in the grass, on the bank 

 of the river, he found it some days after, no bottle, but a gun, such 

 the sound at the opening thereof. And hence, with what degree of 

 sagacity let the reader determine, he seems to derive the origin of 

 bottled ale in England." 



