OHNIONS OF THE PRESS. 



experience For our own parts, we can honestly 



declare that this little book is really both amusing and instructive 

 an assertion which we proceed to prove by one or two brief 



extracts We have had regard in our extracts to the 



amusing passages in The Practical Angler. They who require 

 to be told how to be as successful in clear as in dark waters must 

 study the lessons patiently and intelligibly given by a master of 

 more than fifteen years' experience." 



ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS. 



" That patient class of British sportsmen for whom the Blink- 

 bonnys and the Skirmishers of the turf live and race in vain, and 

 whose hearts are not with the Kestrels or the Americas on the 

 waters of the Solent, or in the tents of the scorers at Lord's or 

 Kennington Oval, but continue to believe, summer after summer, 

 in the spirit of the old song 



* Oh ! the gallant fisher's life, 

 It is the best of any ! ' 



will take this terse little book to their bosom, and .make it the 

 companion of many a river-side pilgrimage. Its aim is not to 

 give any highly-tinted dissertation on the joys of angling, or to 

 produce a series of mental pictures of its most favoured haunts. 

 Alas, for the silver trout ! the author had a much more practical 

 and deadly object in view ; and although the gentle craft have 

 had teachers, and to spare, since their quaint old Isaak wrote, it 

 was reserved for him to prove that almost, if not quite, as good 

 sport may be had in clear water as in coloured. 



" Mr. Stewart brings a large stock of enthusiasm, and fifteen 

 years' practice, to his work. He has gleaned for his letterpress, 

 and his hook and bait illustrations, from nearly all the iiist 

 amateurs and professional anglers of the day, and exchanged 

 minds with Jamie Baillie, the veritable senior wrangler of fly- 

 fishing in Scotland. Delightful as it may be to a beginner to 

 wander, rod in hand, along the banks of some river in May or 

 June, among meadows rich with the daisy and the cowslip, or to 

 contemplate nature in her grander, but not less beautiful aspect, 

 on the rocky heather-clad verge of a Highland stream the 

 pleasures of the day always bear some proportion to the weight 

 of the basket brought home ; and the finest scenery influences 

 are but an indifferent compensation for an empty creel. 



" By carefully studying the precepts so pithily and pleasantly 

 enunciated here, no tyro need despair, after he has undergone his 

 probation, of becoming a practical angler ; and even those who 

 worthily aspire to that distinction already, and have acquired the 

 necessary neatness of hand and quickness of eye, may have their 



