194 FLY FISHING FOR TROUT. 



when the very eye would have made them know 

 they were unwholesome. The English there- 

 fore forbade the taking or selling of unseason- 

 able salmon, which stamped out leprosy. One 

 wonders, however, whether the prohibition was 

 enforced in the interest of the Irish peasant or 

 of the English fly fisher. 



It is not until the seventeenth century that 

 the literature of fly fishing reaches its height. 

 Lawson, an early writer of that period, gives 

 us a tantalising glimpse of what he might have 

 done, had he devoted himself to fishing instead 

 of gardening. His notes on fly fishing have 

 been quoted. Admirable as they are in matter, 

 they are too staccato and telegraphic in form to 

 do justice to his prose. But listen to this, from 

 his New Orchard and Garden-, Walton might 

 have written it. 'One chief grace that adornes 

 an Orchard, I cannot let slip : a brood of 

 Nightingales, who with severall notes and 

 tunes, with a strong delightsome voyce out of 

 a weak body, will bear you company night and 

 day. She loves (and lives in) hots of woods 

 in her heart.' That is surely an apt and 

 beautiful phrase : she loves hots of woods in her 

 heart. It brings to our mind early May, and 

 innumerable nightingales answering each other 

 in Kent or Surrey copses. And again, take 

 Lawson's description of bees. 'Store of Bees, 

 in a dry and warm Bee-house, comely made of 

 Fir boards, to sing and sit, and feed upon your 

 flowers and sprouts, make a pleasant noyse and 



