4 THE PRACTICAL FISHERMAN. 



and desiring his son and daughter to place him in full view of the 

 delightful river Coquet. This they do, and he says : 



Now place my rod beside my hand 



I live in days gone by : 

 I climb the steeps, I move the deeps, 



I throw the cunning fly. 

 Wild whirls my reel, full grows my creel, 



Oh, POD '. oh, loving daughter! 

 In maddest dream was ever stream 



Could match with Coquet's water? 



And so on. I know myself of an angler who still wears beneath 

 the weight of eighty-five years a young man's heart and spirits, which 

 he says is due to seventy years of angling. I assure my readers I have 

 drawn from his valuable experience in the succeeding chapters. Will 

 these facts recommend the uninitiated to angling ? for, like all true 

 believers, I seek ever to proselytise. 



The charm this species of amusement exerts over the angler must 

 be powerful to afford such examples as those I have just quoted, and 

 besides the general reason already given for this, there exists another 

 hardly less considerable, and this may be sought for in a quality which 

 most men possess, namely, a love of nature. This is splendidly ex- 

 plained in the oft-quoted passage from the Prioress of St. Albans, which 

 I have rendered into modern English that the reader may the more 

 readily read it, and which I beg leave to reproduce, it being, apart from 

 its special reference to angling, a sweet pastoral prose poem. She says : 

 " And yet at the least he hath his wholesome walk, and merry at his ease 

 a sweet air of the sweet savour of the mead flowers, that maketh him 

 hungry. He heareth the melodious harmony of fowls. He seeth the 

 young swans, herons, ducks, coots, and many other fowls, with their 

 broods, which to me seemeth better than all the noise of hounds, the 

 blast of horns, and the cry of fowls, that hunters, falconers, and fowlers 

 can make. And if the angler take fish surely there is no man merrier 

 than he is in his spirit." Old Walton also teems with this love of 

 natural music which so eloquently appeals to the angler's better nature, 

 and which in the end becomes as familiar voices from whose soft 

 fascination he cannot nor does he wish to break. Let my readers listen 

 to a few words from him Byron terms him a " quaint old cruel 

 coxcomb," with his accustomed sneer and, after thinking over what 

 they mean, and what I have above said, say whether there is any method 

 or not in the angler's madness. Thus: "Look ! under that broad beech 

 tree I sat down when I was last this way a fishing. And the birds in the 

 adjoining grove seemed to me to have a friendly contention with an echo 

 whose dead voice seemed to live in a hollow tree near the brow of 

 that primrose hill. There I sat, viewing the silver streams glide silently 



