JULY 165 



Naturally, you observe; for here, as elsewhere, certain 

 agencies have been set at work for the destruction of 

 salmon, as if the ultimate object were the extermination 

 of some detestable vermin, instead of the reasonable 

 capture of the most valuable of our food-fishes. I shall 

 notice presently some of the causes which are divesting 

 the Erne of its pristine eminence among the waters of the 

 Emerald Isle. Eminent, perhaps, it still remains, but 

 only by reason of the harsh treatment which other rivers 

 have received. 



Sport upon the occasion of my first visit to the Erne 

 was slack, very slack. I incline to account for the inter- 

 locutory style which Izaak Walton, Richard Franck, and 

 other seventeenth-century writers gave to their treatises 

 upon angling, as the result of the intermittent character 

 of the sport, rather than of the innate garrulity of fisher- 

 men. It is true that there is always opportunity, largely 

 availed of, for coffee-housing by the cover-side ; there is 

 gabble as well as gobble at shooting luncheons a meal 

 shamelessly and blamefully exaggerated of late; but of 

 all field-sports, none lends itself so naturally as angling 

 to the mollia fandi tempora, during spells of enforced 

 inactivity while waiting for the rise to begin, or for a 

 cloud to obscure the sun, or for some other of the occult 

 causes which rouse fish from the torpor to which they are 

 so lamentably prone. At all events, the persistency with 

 which angling literature was cast in conversational form, 

 down to the days of Sir Humphry Davy and Christopher 

 North, seems consistent with this explanation ; and were 

 I to undertake a detailed narrative of my experience on 

 the Erne, it should consist of dialogue, almost wholly on 

 one side. 



