xxxii The Complete Angler 



Again, the Treatise has : 



Angustc. The drake fly. The body of black wall and lappyd 

 abowte wyth blacke sylke : winges of the mayle of the blacke 

 drake wyth a blacke heed." 



Walton has : 



41 The twelfth is the dark drake-fly, good in August : the body 

 made w.th black wool, lapt about with black silk, his wings are 

 made with the mail of the black drake, with a black head." 



This is word for word a transcript of the fifteenth 

 century Treatise. But Izaak cites, not the ancient 

 Treatise r , but Mr. Thomas Barker. * Barker, in fact, 

 gives many more, and more variegated flies than 

 Izaak offers in the jury of twelve which he rendered, 

 from the old Treatise, into modern English. Sir 

 Harris Nicolas says that the jury is from Leonard 

 Mascall's Booke of Fishing with Hooke and Line 

 (London, 1609), but Mascall merely stole from the 

 fifteenth-century book. In Cotton's practice, and 

 that of The Angler's Vade Mecum (1681), flies were 

 as numerous as among ourselves, and had, in many 

 cases, the same names. Walton absurdly bids us 

 " let no part of the line touch the water, but the fly 



\only ". Barker says, " Let the fly light first into the 

 Vater ". Both men insist on fishing down stream, 



/ which is, of course, the opposite of the true art, for 

 fish lie with their heads up stream, and trout are 

 best approached from behind. Cotton admits of 

 fishing both up and down, as the wind and stream 

 may serve : and, of course, in heavy water, in Scot- 

 land, this is all very well. But none of the old 

 anglers, to my knowledge, was a dry-fly fisher, 

 and Izaak was no fly-fisher at all. He took what 

 he said from Mascall, who took it from the old 



1 Barker's Delight; or t The Art of Angling. 1651, 1657, 1659, 

 London. 



