COTTON AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 59 



through fog. He is chiefly a salmon fisher, for 

 he is the first who wrote from experience; and 

 as he travelled in Scotland from the Border to 

 Sutherland and back, he naturally had plenty 

 of that. Unfortunately, words attracted him 

 more than things, and bombastic reflections 

 more than observation and description : fishing 

 is overlaid with a worthless mass of moral dis- 

 quisition, just as any account of the state of 

 Scotland in 1658, the year of Cromwell's death, 

 which might be of great interest and value, is 

 sacrificed to a turgidity which is often hardly 

 intelligible. Still, something of fishing value 

 can be recovered, and it is all to the increase of 

 Franck's reputation. 



Franck is known chiefly for his attack on 

 Walton, whom he calls a ' scribling putationer,' 

 a ' mudler,' ' deficient in Practicks, and in- 

 digent in the lineal and plain Tracts of Experi- 

 ence, who stuffs his Book with Morals from 

 Dubravius and others, not giving us one Prece- 

 dent of his own practical Experiments, except 

 otherwise where he prefers the Trencher before 

 the Troling-Rod : who lays the stress of his 

 arguments upon other Men's Observations, 

 wherewith he stuffs the undigested Octavo.' Sir 

 Walter Scott comments drily that any reader 

 must wish that Walton, with his eye for nature 

 and his simple Arcadian style, had made the 

 journey instead of Franck. 



Next to him comes Thomas Barker, a Shrop- 

 shire man, but living in Henry the Seventh's 



