BIBLIOGRAPHICAL PREFACE. xlvii 



thinks that what Wahon savs of flv-fishina: was communi- 

 cated to him personally by Barker, when, in fact, Walton 

 states that he drew it from Barker's " little book," which 

 was published two years before Walton's first edition. 

 We shall have other instances of Hawkins's want of ac- 

 curacy. Copies of the early editions, though rare, are 

 sometimes met with. Burns's reprints were but a hundred 

 copies each. 



Thus I have given some account of all the books on 

 angling now known to have been published in England 

 before Walton's Complete Angler. It is not, however, 

 improbable that some treatises may have been lost. Wal- 

 ton, in his complimentary note to Col. Venables, says that 

 he had read and practised by many books of this kind 

 before made public ; and in his xviith. chapter he quotes 

 for " sport's sake an old rhyme out of an old fish book," 

 which rhyme, it seems from their silence, the commentators 

 on the Angler have been unable, like myself, to find in any 

 treatise extant. John Hockenhull, Esqr., in his " Pleasant 

 Hexameter Verses in praise of Mr. (Thomas) Barker's 

 Book of Angling,''^ asks : 



" Markham, Ward, Lawson, dare you with Barker now compare ?" 



but we have no trace of an angling book by any one of 

 the second name. These unknown piscatorial treasures 

 are hid in oblivion with the lost books of Livy.* 



* Fishing seems to have afforded not a few similes for the pulpit, in the 

 more early part of this century. The Rev. Mr. Cotton had in his col- 

 lection a copy, which he considered unique, of " A Booke of Angling or 

 Fishing, wherein is shewed by conference with Scriptures the Argument 

 betweene the Fishermen, Fishes and Fishing of both JVatures, Temporall 

 and Spirituall. By Samukl GAJii>iNEK, Doctor of Divinitie. Matthew 

 iv., 19 : ' / will make you fishers of men.' London : Printed by Thomas 

 Parfoot. 1606." And in a Visitation Sermon, called " The Fisher,'' preach- 

 ed at Horncastle, Lincolnshire, by Wm. Worship, D.D., and printed for 

 Thomas Parvier, London, 1615, there is the following enumeration oi 



