40 Ikin^s of tbe IRob, IRifle, an& (Bun 



hardness of his trade communicate itself to his 

 character. 



I don't think that many persons nowadays read 

 his lives of Donne, and Wotton, and Herbert, and 

 Hooker, and Sanderson, albeit, Wordsworth says : 



The feather, whence the pen 



Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men, 

 Dropp'd from an angel's wing." 



His best work, as he himself no doubt believed, is in 

 those admirable Lives. But posterity has thought 

 otherwise, and "The Compleat Angler" lives in un- 

 fading greenness, while all the rest has withered into 

 oblivion. And yet " The Compleat Angler " is a perfect 

 cyclopaedia of errors. Even in that art of angling on 

 his knowledge of which he plumed himself, "Father 

 Izaak " was sadly to seek. As a barbel- and chub-fisher 

 he was without doubt unrivalled, and his instructions for 

 the taking of these, and indeed most other, coarse fish 

 could hardly be improved upon. But when he has the 

 temerity to write about salmon, trout, grayling, or pike 

 he displays a pitiful ignorance both of the habits of the 

 fish and of the modes of taking them. He admits that 

 his directions on fly-fishing, of which he knew absolutely 

 nothing, were given to him " by an ingenious brother 

 of the angle, an honest man and most excellent fly- 

 fisher," but even then they are practically worthless. 

 He quotes freely, too, from Thomas Barker, who really 

 did know something about fly-fishing ; sometimes, 

 indeed, good Master Walton, who had a considerable gift 

 of appropriation, " lifts " whole passages of Barker without 



