68 NOTES ON FISH AND FISHING. 



fish in books on angling. I need hardly say that we must 

 not look to the old books for any great excellence in this 

 respect. The cuts in Walton's first edition are better 

 perhaps than we might have expected, but the heads 

 of all the fish are fearfully and wonderfully made, while 

 their fins are painfully ragged and "jagged." The best 

 illustrations I know of in any angling book are those in 

 Hofland's Angler's Manual, almost all the wood-cuts being 

 from pictures of fish painted by himself. Though a fish 

 is very simple in outline, it is seldom that it "conies out" 

 naturally on paper, and T have seen but few good coloured 

 engravings. The attempts in this latter line in the Fisher- 

 man's Magazine (which perhaps I ought to have men- 

 tioned was published in monthly numbers during the years 

 1864 and 1865, and was a most interesting piscatorial jour- 

 nal), though no trouble or expense was spared to produce 

 exact copies of nature, can hardly be considered a success 

 even in the majority of instances ; while an ambitious artist 

 in Ronald's Fly-fisher's Entomology has given us a trout 

 and grayling in which the vivid colouring has gone very 

 far beyond that which the most brilliant of their tribe ever 

 exhibited. Mr. Rolfe, of Nicholas Lane in the City, can 

 paint a fish to nature, and has well earned for himself the 

 title of " The Landseer of Pishes ;" but we still need great 

 improvement in the various arts applicable to the illustra- 

 tion of books on angling. 



To those who would wish to make a longer excursus 

 into the " Literature of Fishing," I would give the advice 

 first, to procure some of the published Catalogues of 

 books on angling. Of course the British Museum Cata- 

 logue is to be consulted. I notice in my edition of Boaz's 

 Angler's Progress (1820), that there is an advertisement of 



