COTTON AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 65 



than he had received, and he tended and kept 

 alive a flame which otherwise might have 

 flickered out. 



Charles Cotton, a Royalist too, devoted friend 

 and spiritual son of Izaak Walton, wrote what 

 is perhaps all round the best book on fly fishing 

 ever written. The affectionate friendship be- 

 tween these two men has always surprised those 

 who do not know the binding force of a common 

 sport : Walton, the retired tradesman, the 

 friend and biographer of good and pious men, 

 and Cotton, the dissolute aristocrat, the spend- 

 thrift courtier, writer of obscene poetry. But 

 there was an affectionate intimacy between 

 them, and Walton visited Cotton and fished his 

 beautiful Dove. Cotton writes like a man of 

 the world and a man of letters. His prose is 

 pleasant and clear, and though he cannot 

 handle dialogue as Walton and there are traces 

 of that incipient woodenness of which later 

 years were to show so many examples, still the 

 book can be read for itself for the pleasure of 

 its good English. Cotton, Barker and Ven- 

 ables between them, Cotton more especially, 

 place fly fishing on a much higher level than 

 anything before them. They all contributed, 

 and none of them can be spared : and it is worth 

 spending some time on seeing what they did, 

 and where the sport stood when they had done 

 with it. 



There are four great landmarks in fly fishing. 

 The first is imitation, the copying of the colour 



