212 FLY FISHING FOR TROUT. 



was the first treatise of its kind published in 

 Scotland. He lives, however, in his verse 

 rather than his prose. He is always a poet, 

 and always by Tweedside : thither he returns, 

 however far he has wandered. 



An' Gala, too, an' Teviot bright, 



An' mony a stream o' playfu' speed ; 



Their kindred valleys a' unite 



Amang the braes o' bonnie Tweed. 



The Tweed, and fly fishing on the Tweed that 

 is what stirred him. It was for fly fishing, he 

 says, that Thomson, Burns, Scott and Hogg, 

 and, in his own day, Wilson and Wordsworth, 

 exchanged eagerly the grey-goose quill and the 

 companionship of books, for the taper wand 

 and the discourse, older than Homer's 

 measures, of streams and cataracts. For this 

 Paley left his meditative home, Davy his tests 

 and crucibles, and Chantrey his moulds, 

 models, and chisel work. Stoddart is symbolic 

 of his age as Walton is of his. And, though 

 the later age produced no writer whose prose 

 lives as does that of Walton, the two periods 

 were not dissimilar. In both men were not 

 ashamed to say what fishing meant to them. 

 The later age did not say it so well as Walton, 

 but it said it as sincerely. 'Anglers are a more 

 gifted and higher order of men than others, 

 in spite of the sneers of pompous critics, or the 

 trumpery dixit of a paradoxical poet. In their 

 histories, there are glimpses snatched out of 



