44 FJ.Y FISHING FOR TROUT. 



hasty were some of Ben Jonson's judgments, 

 mighty critic though he was ; for did he not tell 

 Drummond of Hawthornden that Donne de- 

 served hanging for his lack of numbers and 

 that Shakespeare wanted art? And as to 

 Markham's integrity, let it not be forgotten 

 that he lived in an age not famed for literary 

 scrupulosity, in which the law of copyright 

 was very different from what it is to-day. In 

 his time authors sold their books outright to 

 stationers, who printed and published them, 

 and if Markham robbed at all he robbed them. 

 Far be it from me to defend robbing publishers, 

 but robbing authors of the fruit of their brain 

 as well as of their cash has always been con- 

 sidered the more shameful crime. However, 

 the chief thing to be said in his defence is that 

 he was not, and never pretended to be, a man 

 of letters. He has been called the earliest 

 English hackney writer, and that is a true 

 description, but a truer one would be a writer 

 of text books. Were he alive now, he would 

 give us text books on agriculture, text books on 

 sport, text books on cooking. He started by 

 writing on horsemanship when he was five and 

 twenty, and during his life he occupied himself 

 in turns with poetry both sacred and profane, 

 agriculture, medicine, romances, plays, gar- 

 dening, hunting, veterinary science, racing, 

 fishing, cockfighting, archery, fowling, hawk- 

 ing, heraldry, household economy and military 

 drill and tactics. He wrote a poem on Sir 



