96 THE PIKE 



necessity of sound tackle, and giving a hint which 

 should not be unnoticed of the silk and the twisted 

 hair lines which staunchly held their own until the 

 present generation, and are still in favour with 

 patriarchal fly fishers. Leaving the predatory fish 

 for a moment, I may add that the versifier has three 

 stanzas about the bottom-feeding fish which eat corn, 

 seed, crumbs of bread, paste or cheese, grasshoppers, 

 wasps, hornets, bees, berries, worms, snails, buzzing 

 flies, and ' crauling ientiles small.' But he soon 

 returns to the tyrants of the water that are shunned 

 by the rest. 



In his 'Walton and the Earlier Fishing Writers,' 

 Mr. R. B. Marston says that so far as he has been 

 able to discover, Thomas Barker was the first English 

 writer to mention the use of the winch. Published 

 in 1651, we have from him a curious little book called 

 ' Barker's Delight, or the Art of Angling, wherein are 

 discovered many rare secrets very necessary to be 

 known by all that delight in that recreation, both 

 for catching the fish, and dressing thereof.' Walton 

 had apparently read his Barker, and borrowed there- 

 from in his brief reference to trolling. 



Father Izaak was so much a contemporary of 

 the Thomas Barker quoted by ' Piscator,' that in 

 1653 Richard Harriot, the St. Dunstan's Churchyard 



