TO 



MY MOST WORTHY FATHER 1 AND FRIEND, 



MR. IZAAK WALTON, THE ELDER. 



SIR, 



BEING you were pleased, some years past, to grant me 

 your free leave to do what I have here attempted; and 

 observing you never retract any promise when made in 

 favour even of your meanest friends; I accordingly expect 

 to see these following particular Directions for the taking 

 of a Trout, to wait upon your better and more general 

 Rules for all sorts of Angling. And though mine be nei- 

 ther so perfect, so well digested, nor indeed so handsomely 

 couch'd, as they might have been, in so long a time as 

 since your leave was granted, yet I dare affirm them to 

 be generally true : and they had appeared too in some" 



(1) It was a practice with the pretended masters of the Hermetic science, to 

 adopt favourite persons for tbeir sons, to whom they imparted their secrets. 

 Ashmole, in his Diary, p. 25, says, " Mr. Backhouse told me, I must now needs 

 be his sou, because he had communicated so many secrets to me." Aud a little 

 after, p. C~. " My father Backhouse, lying sick in Fleet-street, told me, in syl- 

 lables, the true matter of the philosopher's stone, which he bequeathed to roe 

 as a legacy." See more of this practice, and of the tremendous solemnities 

 with which the secret was communicated, in Ashmole's Theat. Chem. Brit. 

 p. 440. 



And, in imitation of this practice, Ben Jonson adopted several persons his 

 sons, to the number of twelve or fourteen; among whom were, Cartwright, Ran- 

 dolph, and Alexander Brome. And it should seem, by the text, that Walton 

 followed the above-mentioned examples, by adopting; Cotton for his son. 



