FROM COTTON TO STEWART. 97 



was enormous. At the same time in England 

 Sir Humphry Davy, as a bye product during 

 ill-health, gave the world a book whose merits 

 are often disregarded, largely I believe because 

 it is written in dialogue, a literary form which 

 that great man was lamentably incompetent to 

 handle. He wrote it, Scott reviewed it in the 

 Edinburgh Review, and the world read it. 

 Penn, too, wrote a good book, invaluable for 

 its description of contemporary fishing on the 

 Test ; Charles Kingsley made fishing an element 

 in muscular Christianity : while Pulman, with- 

 drawn from view in the West Country and 

 musing on problems of fishing where the clear 

 Axe winds through level meadows, suddenly, 

 and all unnoticed till long after, produced the 

 theory and practice of the dry fly full grown 

 from the brain of its parent. It was a great 

 age, the union of fishing and letters, long 

 divorced. Fishing was fashionable. The 

 names of writers on the sport were household 

 words ; for who had not heard of Thomas Tod 

 Stoddart, equally famous as fisherman, writer 

 and poet? We are still living under the 

 influence of those great anglers, and my own 

 generation certainly was deeply moulded by 

 them. I suppose that for those now starting 

 to fish Halford and Lord Grey take their 

 places, and they are worthy to fill them. But I 

 for one would not exchange my privilege of 

 having been brought up under an earlier age. 

 Stewart was the first fishing book I owned ; and 



