FROM COTTON TO STEWART. 83 



into epochs. Advance followed advance by 

 measured and orderly procession ; we are hardly 

 aware that we are travelling, and it is only 

 when we have reached the end and look back 

 that we are conscious of the distance which we 

 have covered. 



But from another point of view the period 

 shows a marked division. Up to the end of 

 the eighteenth century it was one of technical 

 rather than intellectual progress : a progress 

 wrought by the tackle maker rather than by the 

 writer or thinker. No great names stand out. 

 There are neither great masters of the rod nor 

 great masters of the pen. I know of only one 

 eighteenth century prose writer, and he an 

 unimportant one, included in the very catholic 

 ambit of the Dictionary of National Biography, 

 whilst in the seventeenth and nineteenth 

 centuries there are many. Indeed I am not 

 sure that the best writing is not to be found in 

 poetry. Of Gay's Rural Sports, excellent 

 though unequal, the most excellent are the 

 passages describing fishing. He was clearly a 

 good performer. A Barnstaple man, he had 

 at his door an unrivalled territory, and it was 

 probably there that he learnt his devotion to 

 the fly. 



Around the steel no tortured worm shall twine, 

 No blood of living insect stain my line : 

 Let me, less cruel, cast the feathered hook, 

 With pliant rod across the pebbled brook. 



