CHAPTER V 



IN 1651 was published The Art of Angling, wherein 

 are discovered many rare secrets, very necessary to 

 be known by all that delight in that recreation. 

 Written by Thomas Barker. An Ancient Practitioner 

 in the said Art. 



Barker, the author of this work, was a writer of an 

 entirely different stamp from Mascall and Markham. 

 He was, as he confesses in his preface, no scholar ; 

 and therefore unable, even if he had wished to do 

 so, to abstract from foreign sources the material for 

 his book. In fact he appears to have written with 

 a view to conveying the information which he had 

 acquired from a life-long experience of angling. His 

 remarks on fly-fishing form perhaps the most interest- 

 ing portion of his work, and these were copied and 

 acknowledged by the great Izaak Walton. 



The high sporting spirit which is so pleasing a 

 feature in most of the old angling works is unfortu- 

 nately absent from this work of Barker's ; if Walton 

 is rightly called the common father of anglers, and 

 Nobbes the father of trollers, the title of father of 



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