Fishes of the A ngle. 121 



"The various arts how fishes might be caught, 

 Sometimes with trembling reed, and single hair, 

 And bait conceal'd, he'd for their death prepare, 

 With melancholy thoughts and downcast eyes 

 Expecting, till deceit had gain'd its prize ; 

 Sometimes, in riv'let quick, and water clear, 

 They'd meet a fate more gen'rous from his spear. 

 To basket oft he'd pliant osier turn, 

 Where they might entrance find, but not return. 

 His net, well pois'd with lead, he'd sometimes throw, 

 Encircling thus his captives all below. 

 But when he would a quick destruction make, 

 And from afar much larger booty take, 

 He'd through the stream where most descending, set 

 From side to side his strong capacious net ; 

 And then his rustic crew, with mighty poles, 

 Would drive his prey from out their oozy holes, 

 And so pursue them down the rolling flood 

 Gasping for breath, and almost chock'd with mud, 

 Till they, of farther passage quite bereft, 

 Were in the mesh, with gills entangled left." 



There is nothing in these lines to hint at pitifulness in 

 the writer, and the same want of sympathy with the fish 

 except on very rare occasions, where, as in Mackay, the fish 

 are warned against their " enemy " is characteristic of all 

 piscatorial verse. 



That the world sustained a great loss in the destruction 

 of Solomon's work on Fishes, may be accepted as beyond 

 dispute ; for let the scientific attainments of the sumptuous 

 builder have been what they might, there can be no doubt 

 of it Solomon, who was of an artistic kind, would have pre- 

 served to posterity vast quantities of old-world nonsense, 

 possibly even of antediluvian facts, which are now hopelessly 

 lost to us ; and except Solomon, no other personage of 

 Holy Writ has expatiated on the subject of fishes. We 

 have no Scriptural recognition of any great fisher " before 

 the Lord." Indeed the untranslated Bible is singularly 

 reticent on the subject, for it does not specify a single fish. 

 Tobit's fish and Jonah's fish, the fishes of the Psalms and 

 of the New Testament, are spoken of only genetically, and 



