FROM TREATISE TO COMPLEAT ANGLER. 45 



Richard Grenville and the 'Revenge' which 

 without doubt served as Tennyson's model. He 

 is reputed to have imported the first Arab 

 horses, and to have sold one to James I. for 

 500. He knew Latin, French, Italian, Span- 

 ish and probably Dutch. He possessed a prose 

 style which was fluent, accurate and not dis- 

 agreeable. If he stole, he stole good matter. 

 He popularised and preserved books [which but 

 for him would be unknown or lost, and he un- 

 doubtedly added to the sum of general know- 

 ledge of his day. He had a keen eye for the 

 popular taste, tireless industry and an immense 

 circulation, and when the account is cast and 

 the balance struck not only his contemporaries 

 but posterity also is deeply in his debt. 



My copy of Markham is a late edition, when 

 it had grown to a fat volume. Its pages are 

 stained and worn, as though thumbed by many 

 a rushlight : and I imagine it the treasured 

 possession of some country house, handed 

 down from father to son, taken out reverently 

 on winter evenings. For it contains everything 

 the country dweller or his wife wants to know. 

 Care of horse and hound ; improvement of bar- 

 ren soil ; cost in time and labour of every opera- 

 tion of husbandry; treatment of all kinds of 

 cattle in health and sickness and the growing 

 of every kind of crop; how to bake, brew and 

 cook; household surgery and simple medicine; 

 fishing, shooting with the long bow, bowling, 

 tennis, and the baloone; the dieting of fighting 



