Getting Out the }'!)> Books 



little brook "when the Sanguinaria is in 

 bloom." 



It is curious to observe how surely this 

 note of sympathy with nature was struck 

 four hundred years ago, by Dame Juliana 

 Berners, and how it reappears as a leading 

 motive in the best of angling-books all 

 the way down to our day, whether Wal- 

 ton discourses to his scholar or Norris is 

 "fly-fishing alone." Curious, too, is the 

 vein of moralizing which runs through the 

 elder English writers on angling, whether 

 from the fashion of the time or from direct 

 imitation of Dame Juliana, their model in 

 so many things else. Although criticism 

 denies the authorship of "The Treatyse of 

 Fysshynge wyth an Angle" to the Dame, 

 one cannot doubt as he reads it, that it is 

 the work of some ecclesiastic, who, nat- 

 urally, would give first place to the only 

 field sport permissible in those days to the 

 cloth. It was almost an inspired foresight 

 which placed the work in such connection 

 that it would be read only by "gentyll and 

 noble men," and kept out of "the hondys 

 of eche ydle persone whyche wolde desire 

 it yf it were enpryntyd allone by itself 

 . . . to the entent that the forsayd ydle 

 persones whyche sholde haue but lytyll 

 mesure in the sayd dysporte of fysshyng 



