THE COMPLETE ANGLER. PART I. 



as any age can produce : and his custom was to spend 

 besides his fixed hours of prayer, (those hours which, by 

 command of the church, were enjoined the clergy, and 

 voluntarily dedicated to devotion by many primitive 

 Christians,) I say, besides those hours, this good man was 

 observed to spend a tenth part of his time in Angling ; 

 and, also, (for I have conversed with those which have 

 conversed with him,) to bestow a tenth part of his revenue, 

 and usually all his fish, amongst the poor that inhabited 

 near to those rivers in which it was caught; saying often, 

 " that charity gave life to religion :" and, at his return to 

 his house, would praise God he had spent that day free 

 from worldly trouble ; both harmlessly, and in a recrea- 

 tion that became a churchman. And this good man was 

 well content, if not desirous, that posterity should know 

 he was an Angler; as may appear by his picture, now to 

 be seen, and carefully kept, in Brazen-nose College; to 

 which he was a liberal benefactor. In which picture he 

 is drawn, leaning on a desk, with his Bible before him ; 

 and on one hand of him, his lines, hooks, and other 

 tackling, lying in a round ; and, on his other hand, are 

 his Angle-rods of several sorts; 1 and by them this is 

 written, "that he died 13 Feb. 1601, being aged 95 

 years, 44 of which he had been Dean of St. Paul's 

 church; and that his age neither impaired his hearing, 



(1) Puller, in his Worthies, (Lancashire, page 115.) has thought it worth 

 recording of this pious and learned divine, and that in language so very quaint 

 a* to be bat just intelligible, that he was accustomed to fish in the Thames ; 

 and having one dajjeft his bottle of ale in the grass, on the bank of the river, 

 he found it some days after, no bottle but a gun, such the sound at the open- 

 ing thereof. And hence, with what degree of sagacity let the reader deter- 

 mine, he seems to derive the original of bottled ale in England. Could he 

 have shewn that the bottle was of leather, it is odds but he had attributed to 

 him the invention of that noble vehicle, and made. 



^ his soul in heaven to dwell, 

 For first devising the leatharn bottel; 



as, in a fit of maudlin devotion, sings the author of a humorous and well- 

 known old ballad. 



