INTRODUCTION. 19 



are not confined to anglers. If you want them in per- 

 fection, you must go elsewhere. You must go to the 

 grave formal treatises, put together by the plodding, the 

 diligent, the calculating, the scientific you must go to 

 engineers without wigs, and doctors with them to cal- 

 culators of levels, distances, diameters, and forces to 

 chemists, and laborators, and manipulators of all kinds 

 to men, in short, of grave physiognomies, dirty hands, 

 and begrimed countenances, who never were in love with 

 any thing but cog-wheels, high-pressure engines, convex 

 rails, furnaces, horizontal chimneys, retorts, spirit-levels, 

 theodolites, and spinning jennies. In fact, if you want 

 to see the " vagaries" of the human mind on the " high 

 ropes," in the highest state of rankness, you must go 

 to a patent office, or a parliamentary agency establishment. 

 There, together with the rarest efforts of human ingenuity, 

 you will find a strange admixture of extravagancies beyond 

 the dreams of madmen, the exaggerations of the poet, or 

 the speculations of the philosopher. It is impossible to 

 caricature the list of projects of the brain exhibited in 

 such places. Sir Able Handy's plan of making saw-dust 

 into deal boards, or the hunting razors by which a man 

 might shave himself when galloping after the hounds, 

 are far below some of the supereminently intellectual 

 pursuits of the day, which are patronized and fostered 

 and cherished and paid for by a " discerning public." 



It has been objected to the art of angling, that it is an 

 idle waste of time, which might be turned to far better 

 account; a devotion of valuable and irrevocable hours to 

 a pursuit undeserving so great a sacrifice. This, we 

 apprehend, is a quiet way of begging the entire question 

 a cool assumption of the very fact which the objector is 

 bound to prove. The angler alleges that his hours are 



