ROBERT BLAKEY ix 



Mercury, discoursing on moral and mental philosopliy. 

 The work of which he was always proudest in his riper 

 years was his History of tlie Philosophy of the Mind, 

 and here we have the soil in which the early seeds 

 were sown. Returning to his native town in 1815, 

 he established his connection with the press, and 

 became a regular contributor to various periodical 

 publications. He began to feel an interest in the 

 Reform movement, and mentions that, though he took 

 no personal part in the proceedings, he was upon the 

 hustings erected on the Town Moor in Newcastle, at a 

 famous meeting in 1820, where upwards of a hundred 

 thousand people were present. At the age of twenty- 

 two he_ was writing political articles for the Black 

 Dwarf (which had a wide circulation on account of the 

 suppression of Cobbett's Register) and for the DurJiam 

 Chronicle; and in 1822 he married. 



Our special point of interest, however, begins in his 

 own incidental statement that, during all these struggles, 

 studies, and introductions to men of local note, he spent 

 much of his spare time in angling and shooting, par- 

 ticularly the former. It was the family of Newton, 

 nurserymen, he says in grateful remembrance, who 

 made him comparatively proficient in fly-fishing. These 

 were halcyon days; and young Blakey, thanks to the 

 generous permission of the Duke of Northumberland, 

 had almost the entire water of the Alnwick River down 

 to the tideway to himself. 



What a delight it must have been to him in one of 

 his angling excursions to meet with Sir Walter Scott ! 

 Blakey was fly-fishing in the river Yarrow, a little 

 below Selkirk Bridge, when a gentleman accompanied 

 by two dogs came up and asked him whether he had 

 any sport. " Very little," was the answer. The gentle- 

 man suggested that he probably was not using the right 

 flies for the river, and asked to look at his patterns. 

 Blakey showed him the flies, and the stranger said, 

 "I think I can give you two that will very likely 

 answer better than those you are using." So saying, 

 he took out his fly-book, which seemed to contain a 



