THE COMPLETE ANGLER. 225 



CHAPTER XIX/ 



Of several Rivers, and some Observations of Fish. 



PiscATOR. Well, Scholar, since the ways and weather do both 

 favor us, and that we yet see not Tottenham-Cross, you shall see 

 my willingness to satisfy your desire. And first, for the rivers 

 of this nation, there be, as you may note out of Doctor Heylin's 

 Geography* and others, in number 325 ; but those of chiefest 

 note he reckons and describes as foUoweth. 



The chief is Thamisis, compounded of two rivers, Thame and 

 Isis : whereof the former, rising somewhat beyond Thame in 



1 Var. This chapter was not in the first edition, but added to the 

 second. 



* The title of Heylin's work is Cosmography, originally published as a 

 small octavo, with the title of Microcosmos, or a Little Description of the 

 Great World; enlarged to 4to., Oxford, 1622, 1633, and afterwards to a 

 large folio — Cosmography in Four Books, containing the Chorographie 

 and Historic of the whole World, and all the Principal Kingdoms, Pro- 

 vinces, Seas and Isles thereof, 1652-64, '66, '82. Walton has copied ver- 

 batim, from the latter work, the whole passage beginning. " The chief is 

 Thamisis," to the end of Michael Drayton's Sonnet. 



Peter Heylin was born in 1600, and early distinguished himself by his 

 talents and learning, taking his degree of Master of Arts in his twentieth 

 year, and of D.D. in 1633. Deprived of his church preferments, he lived 

 some time in studious retirement, until at the Restoration he received his 

 preferments again, but never rose higher than sub-Dean of Westminster, 

 and died in 1662. He was a very voluminous writer and a keen contro- 

 versialist. His learning was very great, and his talents remarkable, but, 

 as Wood observes, " He was too much of a party man to be an historian, 

 and equally an enemy to Popery and Puritanism." To what extent he 

 carried his notions may be inferred from the high favor in which he stood 

 with Laud, and the fact of his having determined in the negative the two 

 questions, " Whether the Church is ever invisible ?" and " Whether the 

 Church can err .'" From his polemical histories of Episcopacy and Pres- 

 byterianism, he deserves the epithet not seldom applied to him of " un- 

 candid." — Im. Ed. 



IV 



