40 REMARKS^PRELIMINARY. 



in whatever his hand might have found to do. A 

 mind too versatile to have been confined within the 

 critical rules of any age or art had excited him to 

 write out his mixed thoughts, feelings, conceits, 

 songs, and sermons, on all favourite subjects, just as 

 they occurred to his fancy hence all are found 

 pouched up together like his fish baits. Had he 

 not fallen madly fond of angling pursuits, I have no 

 doubt but he might have been one of the greatest 

 devotees of his superstitious age. Or had he turned 

 to " the breeding of the fighting-cock," like several 

 of his angling predecessors, he would likely have 

 crossed on till he had produced midden fowls to 

 have beaked it with eagles; but luckily he had 

 not the cock-fighting propensity. And what, 

 after all, was fishing in the Dove and Stowr, with 

 paddock baits, for geds and gudgeons, to the run of a 

 salmon in the silver Tweed 1 I wonder how he would 

 have looked if he had been brought here by rail, and 

 set down below our Hare Crag with a twenty feet 

 rod in hand, and seen and felt a twenty pound salmon 

 snap down his fly to the bottom, and there hold it 

 as firmly as if it had been fixed to the rock in 

 the deep, with only a little tremulous indication of 

 life at both ends : and then, again, when the sudden 

 bolt up the strong current took place, with the dash out 



