156 IZAAK WALTON AND ANOTHER 



in Cromwell's Ironsides, and a keen angler. His book 

 is well-nigh as full of theological disputation as of dis- 

 course upon fish and fishing; but it abounds in quaint 

 stories and interesting topographical description. Nothing 

 in this changeful, unchanging world is more capricious 

 than the fortune of books. Franck was incomparably a 

 better fisherman and a sounder naturalist than Walton 

 his Northern Memoirs is a volume over which any 

 modern angler might pore with delight; yet for every 

 reader who has ever so much as heard of it, there are 

 scores who could pass examination in The Compleat 

 Angler. Franck, even at the present day, would be 

 reckoned a good salmon-fisher. Of salmon, as Mr. Andrew 

 Lang has observed, Izaak ' scarcely speaks a true word 

 about their habits except by accident,' and of catching 

 them he knew nothing save by hearsay. He never used, 

 he never even saw used, a fishing-reel or winch. 



' Note also,' says he, ' that many used to fish for salmon with 

 a ring of wire on the top of their rod, through which the line 

 may run to as great a length as is needful when he is hooked. 

 And to that end some use a wheel about the middle of their 

 rod or near their hand, which is to be observed better by seeing 

 one of them than by a large demonstration of words.' 



Izaak got on very well without a reel. If a fish pulled 

 too hard for safety, he had recourse to the primitive 

 device of ' casting the rod to him into the water, for so 

 I use always to do when I meet with an overgrown fish.' 

 That might serve his turn in the gently trotting waters 

 of Hampshire or Derbyshire, but it would be like to prove 

 a costly expedient in the Trows of Makerstoun or Campsie 

 Linn. 



Scott expressed much regret in his preface that Walton 



