Benefits of Angling. 237 



the deep poetic effects of the lovely hills, glades, dells, 

 and rivers of England or Scotland. You require to 

 see everything in the far distance to get any fine effect 

 at all. The most beautiful bit of landscape turns into 

 a mud-heap of olive groves or a market-garden. If 

 we had but a rather better climate, I think there is no 

 place more purely poetically beautiful than the more 

 picturesque parts of our own country — so soft, so 

 dewy, and so deliriously changeful under changing 

 lights and shades, and yet restful too." 



Full justification for the sport of fly-fishing on the 

 streams or on the lakes of our northern regions, were 

 there no other, might be found in this, that in scarce 

 any other manner could those indulging in it be so 

 unconsciously impressed and educated in the sense of 

 the truly imaginative picturesque. If as Izaak Walton 

 declared of angling that it was "the contemplative 

 man's recreation " northern fly-fishing may be regarded 

 as the sport above all others that leads to imaginative 

 reverie and to poetry. 



Even the rattling, somewhat too boyish, high-spirited 

 " Christopher North " knew this, and acted on it, as is 

 to be seen not only in such essays as " Streams," but 

 in those delightful pathetic tales, " Lights and Shadows 

 of Scottish Life," which are, in great part no doubt, 

 the outcome of Christopher's wanderings by stream and 

 glen, by wood and mountain, and by moor, into which 

 he was led for most part by his keen love of the angle 

 and the fly and the landing-net. 



