EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 



BY SIR HERBERT MAXWELL, BT. 



IT'S a far cry to Loch Awe,* runs the adage with which 

 the dreaded Campbells, after a successful raid on some 

 weaker clan, were wont to defy reprisals ; but it is a 

 much further cry to that distant day in 1867 when I 

 opened a parcel containing Francis Francis's A Book on 

 Angling, a gift from the author. Of the intervening half- 

 century I have spent serious persons may say wasted a 

 considerable section by the waterside, and another section by 

 the fireside conning some of the vast amount of angling 

 literature that has flowed from the press during that period ; 

 but in all these years I have never detected any fallacy in 

 Francis's precepts for such branches of the fisher craft as I 

 have practised, neither have I handled any book which gives 

 such succinct and trustworthy instruction in every form of 

 freshwater angling. Excellent treatises upon this or that 

 department of the sport might be named ; but Francis dealt 

 with them all ; his experience of them was universal, his 

 knowledge encyclopaedic. There have been changes in practice 

 since Francis fished and wrote. The art of dry fly-fishing, for 

 instance, he dismisses, though with approval, in a couple of 

 paragraphs (pp. in, 128) ; it is now almost exclusive of any 

 other method in chalk streams, besides being often adopted 

 with success on northern and Irish waters. 



In the angler's equipment many improvements have been 

 devised. Just as Izaak Walton had never seen a reel or, as he 

 calls it, " a wheel about the middle of the rod or near the hand, 

 which is to be observed better by seeing one of them than by a 

 large demonstration of words," and advised Venator if he 

 should hook a great trout to throw the rod into the river to 

 him, " for so I use always to do when I meet with an over- 

 grown fish," so Francis had no experience o-f the charm of a 



* Southron readers kindly note that Loch Awe is sounded to rhyme with 

 " how " not with " haw." 



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