172 PLUTARCH—CLEOPATRA—OPPIAN—ATHENAUS 
and slimmer, for fear lest if it catch a broad shadow, it might 
move the doubt and suspicion that is naturally in fishes. 
“‘ Moreover, the line they make not with many water knots” 
(happy anglers !), ‘“‘ but desire to have it as plain and even 
as possibly may be, without any roughness, for that this giveth 
as it were some denuntiation unto them of fraud and deceit. 
They take order likewise that the hairs which reach to the hook 
should seem as white as possibly they can devise, for the whiter 
they be the less are they seen in the water for their conformity 
and likeness in colour to it.” 1 
We anglers seem of a verity “nae gleg at the uptak.” 
After some 1650 years we find John Whitney, in the preface to 
The Genteel Recreation: or the Pleasure of Angling, ascribing 
with modesty as to personal prowess, but quiet pride as to 
discovery, his success very largely to the use of “ fine Tackling ” 
which in the poem (!) he further, if in barbarous verse, enforces, 
‘‘ Fineness in Angling’s th’ Anglers nearest Rule : 
For Prudence must still regulate in all.” ? 
The sentence in his Preface is apposite to many a Preface, 
whether in prose or verse. ‘‘ As to the verse there is fault and 
folly enough, but grant Poetical License, if in pleasing nobody 
I have pleased myself, and that’s all the reward I desire,” for 
alas! to many of us writers self-pleasing must be the sole 
reward of our desert, if not of our desire. 
Misrepresentation as a despiser of fishing and fishermen 
has clutched another victim, Dr. Johnson, of all people! As 
Plutarch hasbeen branded for anopinion not his own,so Johnson 
has been held guilty of the famous libel—‘‘ A worm at one end 
and a fool at the other.’ The popular belief is all false. 
According to Boswell, he was very appreciative—an attitude 
not always Johnsonian—of Walton’s work. 
Again, it was no other than he? who urged Moses Browne 
to bring out in 1750 a new edition—the fifth and last was 
1 De Sol. Anim., 24. (Holland’s Translation.) 
* London, 1700, Dr. Turrell, op. cit., p. 157, believes Whitney to have 
been the first to recommend the use of the floating fly—not for the purpose of 
circumventing the wily trout, but to prevent the fly being gobbled by the 
minnows. 
3 Cf. R. B. Marston, Walton and some Earlier Writers on Angling, 1894, an 
informative and yet delightful volume. 
