ABOUT SOME OF THE DISTINGUISHED ANGLERS 

 OF OUR TIME. 



Though he in all the p( ople's eyes seemed great, 



Yet greater he appeared in his retreat. 



Sir J. Denham. 



In the long catalogue of honorable anglers are the names 

 of apostles, kings, princes, priests, poets, bishops, states- 

 men and philosophers men who made history, ruled 

 nations, honored the church, dignified humanity, and left 

 the impress of their scholarship upon all the centuries. 

 And what they did they did all the better more wisely, 

 more humanely, and with a higher conception of the sacred 

 character of the work assigned them because they had the 

 contemplative habit, proverbial patience and gentle spirit of 

 the simple wise men who love to go a-fishing. 



It has been my fortune to know and to have * 'camped 

 out" with some of the well-known men of our own time, 

 and I have always found them as companionable and merry- 

 hearted as the most humble of the brotherhood. If there 

 was any difference in the zest and enthusiasm with which 

 each class plied their vocation, it arose from the fact that to 

 the former the pastime was in greater contrast with the 

 social and official conventionalities which held them more 

 closely in their chafing trammels, and so gave them a 

 keener appreciation of the freedom which came to them in 

 the quiet places to which their love of angling led them. 

 To all such an "outing" was not simply a holiday; it was 



