POACHING 165 



ing one quite across, they routed about and frightened 

 the fish till they lay half stupefied under or beside the 

 rocks and stones. The poor creatures were then 

 speared from a boat, not worked broadside in front as 

 in burning the water, for ' one artist is sufficient for the 

 amusement.' Many escaped wounded, for ' if you do 

 not strike a fish near the centre of his body, you are 

 never very sure of lifting him.' ' Begin at the lower 

 part of the river that belongs to you, so that you may 

 again come across those fish that escape upwards. If 

 the river continues low for some time, disturbed fish 

 will be continually coming forward, and you may go 

 over your water two or three times at different periods, 

 till you have caught nearly every fish that takes up 

 his seat in it.' 



Here I take leave of Scrope, whom, but for the 

 allowance necessarily made for the times, I should 

 regard — much as I do Benvenuto Cellini after reading 

 his confessions of hardly less heinous iniquities — as a 

 delightful rogue, but one who richly merited the 

 gallows. However, as an Eton boy in my school-days 

 translated the line of Horace — ' Delicta majorum 

 immeritus lues,' 'The delights of our ancestors were 

 unmitigated filth ' — and I do not doubt that he was a 

 fair and even sportsmanlike product of the early part 

 of the century now drawing to an end. At the close 



