210 FLY FISHING FOR TROUT. 



year by year from 1820 to 1864 : they are by 

 different writers, of whom the best known are 

 Thomas Doubleday and Robert Roxby. The 

 verse often reaches a high level : but it suffers, 

 I think, from being written in the Northum- 

 brian dialect. I believe that dialect poetry is 

 only good when you cannot imagine its being 

 written as well in another medium. This is 

 the case with Burns; for whether his Scots 

 poetry be considered to be written in dialect or 

 in a separate language, you cannot conceive it 

 written as well in anything else. So it is with 

 lesser men, such as Barnes, the Dorset poet, 

 and perhaps with Stoddart; and, to take a 

 living example, there is La Passion de noire 

 frere le poilu, written by Marc Leclerc in the 

 Anjou dialect, one of the best poems the war 

 produced. In all these you feel the note of 

 necessity; the poetry had to be in that medium, 

 or not at all. I do not feel that in Doubleday, 

 indeed his non-dialect sonnet is clearly 

 superior. 



Fishing prose came to its own again in the 

 nineteenth century. It sprang into sudden 

 life. One of the reasons for this has already 

 been given : the writings of Scott and the 

 romantic revival. The result was a second 

 golden age, with many points of resemblance 

 to that of Walton. If there is no single writer 

 of his class, there is a high level of excellence. 

 After the disappearance of Stoddart and the 

 others of this epoch, there is another partial 



