BIBLIOTHECA PISCATORIA. 131 



Lathy (Thomas Pike). The angler; a poem, in ten cantos : 

 with proper instructions in the art, rules to choose fishing rods, 

 lines, hooks, floats and baits, and to make artificial flies ; 

 receipts for pastes, &c., and in short, every article relating to 

 the sport. By Piscator. London. Printed for W. Wright, 

 46, Fleet-street ; and M. Hey, i, Somerset-street. Portman- 

 square. 1819. pp. xxi. 234. portrait and woodcuts. 8.; 

 [with new title-page :] 



The angler; a poem, in ten cantos. Comprising proper 



instructions, etc. Embellished with upwards of twenty beauti- 

 ful woodcuts. By T. P. Lathy, Esq. London : printed for J. 

 H. Burn, Maiden-lane. Convent Garden, 1820. 8.; [with 

 another new title-page :] London : printed for Sherwood, 

 Neely and Jones, Paternoster-row. 1822. 8. 



[ This book is one of the worst instances of literary appropriation 

 on record. It was palmed off on Gosden, the sporting bookseller, 

 whose portrait "engraved from a painting bv A. Cooper, A. R. A." 

 is prefixed. He paid ^30 for the copyright and also printed a single 

 copy on vellum at an expense of 10 for the vellum alone, as he, 

 himself, states in a MS. noie to Higgs' sale-catalogue. That Lathy 

 foresaw the possibility of detection, may be inferred from the 

 deprecatory character of his preface, and the prudent modesty with 

 which he 'speaks of himself as "author, editor, or compiler, or 

 whatever other appellation critical jugdment shall be pleased to 

 bestow on me." The only appellation he could claim of right, need 

 not be suggested here. ''The anglers, in eight dialogues," attri- 

 buted to Dr. Scott of Ipswich is transported bodily into Lathy's 

 book, with a few substitutions and modifications, and the suppres- 

 sion of the interlocutors. What is Lathy's own, or, rather, what is 

 not Scott's, in the work, may be found, for the most part in the 

 openings and endings of the different cantos, and, generally, in the 

 descriptive, didactic and devotional passages, the vapid character 

 and lame versification of which dove-tail ill with Scott's more terse 

 and vigorous lines. Lathy's chief end and aim (besides his dis- 

 honest winnings) seems to have been, as he indeed avows in his 

 preface, to further what he rather oddly calls " The union of the sexes 

 in the sport" ai,d on this ground he apostrophises the fair sex in gen- 

 eral, and Col. Thornton, in particular, in a most enthusiastic strain. 

 In Canto x, having exhausted Scott's poem, Lathy has to fall 

 back on his own resources, which do not carry him beyond a few 

 dozen feeble lines. He winds up, characteristically, with a plag- 

 iarism (of course unacknowleged) of Walton's "Angler's wish," 

 the quaint, crisp lines of which he submits to the cruel process of 

 decasyllabic stretching. 



Besides the vellum copy, alluded to above, twenty copies were 

 printed on thick and large paper. Dr. Bethune says in his 

 " Waltonian Library," "I have one in 4to."] 



Latouche (John), pseud [i.e. Oswald J. F. Crawford}. Country 

 house essays. London, Ward and Lock, (1876.) 8. 

 [Trout fishing, pp. 137-196.] 



K 2 



