Fishes of the Angle. 1 19 



the mocking burden of empty creels. Izaak Walton himself 

 is very dreary reading indeed, unless (I -hope I am not pro- 

 fane) for one in the humour to be amused by tediously- 

 sustained affectation. He then becomes undoubtedly 

 "quaint." Most poets, moreover, when they go a- fishing, 

 seem to me to become at the outset apologists for the sport 

 by pointing out how suitable angling is for the observation 

 of Nature as if one could not worship the divinities of 

 river-bank and meado\v, of sedge and overhanging wood, 

 without having a box of worms in one's pocket. I always 

 think of that dragon-fly that comes and sits cross-wise on 

 the tip of the rod whenever an angling poet begins maunder- 

 ing about Nature, and it has been a result of my study of the 

 bards to find that angling is emphatically the pastime of the 

 commonplace versifier. When trivial Gay tries to work 

 himself up into enthusiasm over a salmon, he firks up such 

 a very moderate degree of fervour as reminds one of an 

 organist at an instrument with leaky bellows, that gives forth 

 only "the exiguous residual squeak." Somerville was of 

 course a true poet of the chase, but he is sportsman far 

 before he is poet, and his descriptions are at most times of 

 revolting cruelty. But the majority of the "poets of the 

 Angle" will be found to be invertebrates. They hope by 

 referring to the sky, and the grass, and the water to magnify 

 the sport obliquely, and with a great show of commonplace 

 observation and some piety to enhance indirectly the virtues 

 of an occupation which of itself did not suffice to float their 

 lines. 



Such collections of verse, therefore, represent the poetry 

 of fishing neither adequately nor becomingly. But if 

 a tasteful compilation of the poetry of fishes, "from the 

 oyle-steeped anchovie " to the "cumbrous grampus," from 

 "the sudden rushing of the minnow shoal," scared from 

 the shallows by a passing tread, "to those living islands, 

 whales," were to be made, the result would be found 



