SPORTING LITERATURE. 11 



hunting, why did she pass over her own work ? 

 Such self-effacement is rare among authors. 

 The inference is, of course, obvious; the portion 

 on fishing is not by the same hand as that on 

 hunting, and merely published under the same 

 cover. But the point I want to make is that 

 the authoress had certainly read the Master of 

 Game and refers to it as the model work on 

 hunting. It is highly probable that it served 

 also as her model for her book on a new craft. 

 However, I shall have a good deal to say about 

 the Book of St. Albans later on in this chapter. 



From the Book of St. Albans onwards we 

 part company with French books. There are 

 no good ones until modern times, and these are 

 founded on ours. Henceforth the stream runs 

 on British soil, and it runs deep and full. But 

 the debt which we owe to French literature 

 must not be forgotten, a debt all the greater 

 because it lies in the domain of the spirit. The 

 small amount of fly fishing literature which 

 does exist in France before the nineteenth 

 century is described in Chapter IV. 



We now come to the birth of the first book 

 on fly fishing, and to the England of Henry 

 VII. In the year 1486, a year after Bosworth 

 Field, when Henry of Richmond was settling 

 himself into his still shaky throne, and 

 Columbus was trying to get some king to help 

 him to cross the Atlantic, the schoolmaster 

 printer of St. Albans, whose identity is still 

 unknown, printed the Book of St. Albans. It 



