Walton's River. 93 



remember, according to the lights of the period, very 

 learned, very moral, and breathing of gentleness and peace. 

 Beginning with the subject of otters, the discourse turned 

 upon Montaigne on cats; the habits of birds, upon which 

 Auceps, the hawker, held forth energetically and con- 

 fidently, but, as modern ornithologists teach us, erroneously ; 

 upon the earth as a feeding ground for beasts, as portrayed 

 by Venator in his defence in Hunting versus Angling ; upon 

 water, " the eldest daughter of creation, the element upon 

 which the Spirit of God did first move, the element which 

 God commanded to bring forth living creatures abundantly," 

 — for so said Piscator in his eloquent harangue upon the use 

 of fish from the days of Moses downwards ; upon Florence 

 and Rome, the tomb of Virgil, and the humble house in 

 which St. Paul was content to dwell. Who can forget^ 

 Walton's triumphant asseveration, "I might tell you that 

 Almighty God is said to have spoken to a fish, but never 

 to a beast : that he hath made a whale a ship to carry, and 

 set His prophet Jonah safe on the appointed shore ? " 

 Then came the bold suggestion that if Belus, "the first 

 inventor of godly and virtuous recreations," was not the 

 discoverer of angling, it was Seth, the son of Adam, who 

 taughts the delights of the rod and line to his children, and 

 the equally daring hint that the patriarch Job and the 

 prophet Amos were, if I may without irreverence put it so, 

 the crack anglers of their day; the poetical contemplations 

 of Du Bartas, upon whose authority we have it that a 

 certain fish called the sargus was wont, after playing Don 

 Giovanni amongst his own kind, to flirt wickedly with the 

 " she-goats on the grassy shore"; and many passing remarks 

 about Thracian women and turtledoves, the fish-pools of 

 Heshbon and the piscatorial adventures of Mark Antony and 

 Cleopatra"; 



