APPENDIX. 167 



is her name mentioned. How long* the art of fly-fish- 

 ing had been practised in England before the print- 

 ing of the treatise of fishing with an angle my infor- 

 mation does not enable me to say, not being aware 

 of any English writer previous to 1496, who even 

 alludes to it. Though the art appears to have been 

 but little practised, as may be inferred from the 

 amateur having to manufacture his own hooks, yet 

 we cannot suppose it to have been of very recent 

 introduction. The directions for dressing the twelve 

 different kinds of flies, which even Walton writing 

 a hundred and fifty years later availed himself of, 

 are not such as were likely to be suggested in the 

 infancy of the art. It was probably known though 

 not much followed, long before the old English 

 angler, whoever he might be, committed his obser- 

 vations to the press and disseminated the knowledge 

 of an art at once so useful and so entertaining. From 

 a passage in the " Epistolae obscurorum virorum,"a 

 most humorous and biting satire on the ignorance 

 and vices of the German monks, which was first printed 

 about 1517, it would seem that fishing was occasion- 

 ally practised as an amusement by the brethren ; 

 but whether they understood, like our countrymen, 

 the mystery of fashioning of wool, silk, and feathers, 

 the dun cut, the yellow, the stone, and the drake fly 

 for the beguiling of trouts, does not appear. 



The " Treatyse of fysshshynge wyth angle" to 

 which a wood-cut representing a man fishing, with 

 a float to his line, and a tub to put what he takes in, 

 is prefixed commences with a cheerful text and 

 a brief exposition. " Salamon in his parablys sayth 

 that a good spyryte makyth a flourynge aege, that is 



