THE FISHING GAZETTE 
[June 10, 1893 
410 
wanted exercise on a wet morninp, he used to 
call for “ Scott,” who had to do his best, and my 
informant added with a chuckle, “ If Lord John 
happened by any chance to get the worst of it at 
the outset of the ‘ bout,’ he invariably locked the 
door, and then,” he said, “ the feathers flew! ” 
It became a glove fight, master and man “ going 
in” until exhaustion proclaimed that it was time 
to say, Hold I enough ! ” 
I remember an incident happening about this 
time. 
The Kirkbank gamekeeper, who was a surly 
dog as ever I saw {not Kerss), had some words 
with “Jock Scott” in the stables, and from 
words came to blows. Jock gave him “ pepper,” 
but the man closed with him, and Jock, who was 
not merely half trained, cross buttockedhim into 
an empty stall, prettily, but heavily too. 
Now there was at Kirkbank an enormous 
mastiff about the size of a Shetland pony, and the 
gamekeeper had been in the habit of kicking and 
striking the dog since it was a puppy, until he had 
“ established a funk,” for the dog always slunk 
away at his approach, cowed. He was corre¬ 
spondingly attached to “ Jock Scott,” and had 
been watching the fight, an interested, but a 
passive spectator. The coachman, who told me 
the story, said it was quite frightful to see 
this huge dog, with a savage growl, rush at 
his now prostrate foe, and in one moment 
take the man’s head in his mouth. He lay 
there trembling, all the fight knocked out of 
him. “Jock Scott ” speedily called off the dog, 
ncd the incident ended, and yet not altogether, 
for, from that day forward, the animal knew his 
power, and the brutal gamekeeper was brutal no 
more. The dog met him with head and tail erect 
a gentle curling of the upper lip telling that at 
length he knew who was master of the two brutes. 
Lord John Scott was indeed athorough sports¬ 
man, and, it was said, shortened his days by his 
devotion to sport of all kinds, salmon leistering 
(then legal), otter hunting, fox hunting, shooting, 
fishing, and everything else. I have seen him 
working a punt gun, paddling his own canoe, and 
firing into a swarm of wild duck on Wooden 
Loch, for his boathouse was within a few yards 
of my then residence, Wooden. 
Another story I should like to tell. Lord John 
Scott was going from Kirkbank to Dalkeith 
Palace, one of the seats of the Duke of Buccleuch 
(I think the chief ducal residence). With his usual 
eccentricity, he went third class, amongst tbe 
small farmers, and kept them all in roars of 
laughter till they arrived at the junction 
(Dalkeith), they goingon to Edinburgh. At last 
“ the best of friends must part,” and Lord John 
had to get out, when one of the farmers said to 
him, “Eh, man, but ye are a droll chiel! Now 
wha will you be I wonder ” to which Lord John, 
still keeping up his assumed character of a 
brother farmer, replied, “Oh, man, I’m juist 
Jock, the Laird’s brither!” How surprised and 
delighted at his ready wit the men must have 
been, when they found that he was the brother of 
that nobleman on whose vast estate probably 
most of them resided, the late Duke of Buccleuch. 
To revert to Lord John Scott, his widow Lady 
John Scott, was the writer of some famous Scotch 
songs ; but my memory here fails me, one was 
“ Douglas, Douglas, Tender and True.” Another, 
which I used to sing myself, was written after his 
death (which produced a kind of melancholia in 
her) began thus: 
“ We’ll meet nae mair at sunset, 
W ben tbe weary day is dune; 
Nor wander bame tbegitber. 
In tbe lee licbt o’ tbe mune,” &c. 
Needless to add, she sang of him who lisd gone 
before. They are all together again now, I trust 
—the lord, the lady, and their humble but 
faithful servant, Jock Scott. 
I believe that this will prove instructive to 
many a salmon fisherman who feels more than a 
passing interest in Jock Scott (the fly), and lo! 
here are three" Jock Scotts,” and none of them 
uninteresting I trust. 
Might I be permitted to add one further story 
about Lord John Scott One day, when out 
with his brother’s hounds, he tried to jump “ in 
and out ” of a pigsty—the horse fell, and he 
sustained a shocking fracture of the ankle. He 
was laid up promptly at the farmhouse adjoining 
and, the doctor being called in, his leg was set. 
Time hung heavily on his hands ; and one day 
when he had been left alone, the hounds passed 
the farm. He heard—and was at once upon the 
floor, dragging his broken leg, splints and all, to 
the ■window. Alas .' for his foolish enthusiasm. 
The bones were again displaced, and for the rest 
of his life his foot was turned outwards almost at 
a right angle ; on horseback it was peculiarly 
noticeable. Old hunting men will smile at the 
above story, which is genuine enough. All who 
are herein mentioned have disappeared “ into the 
Silent Land.” May I trust that my little paper 
may breathe a halo of romantic history around 
the “Jock Scott,” and that Major Traherne and 
many more who, like him, angle for the lordly 
salmon, may be interested and amused thereby. 
I thank Mr. Mitchell for conveying the infor¬ 
mation that Jock Scott died on the 2-l.th of 
January this year (189:)), aged just a trifle over 
seventy-six. 
It gives increased interest to me to learn that 
the late Mr. Forrest, of Kelso (then reputed 
to be the foremost rod maker north of the Tweed), 
named the fly after the inventor, having had 
unusual success with the pattern fly which Scott 
gave him. I have still a rod which I purchased 
from him in the beginning of I860. His son’s 
name is well-known. I have four rods bearing 
his and his father’s names, all of which I am 
proud to possess. How many flies have been 
tied, I wonder, since the founder of that firm 
first baptized it “ Jock Scott ” ? 
A TRUE BILL. 
By Val Conson. 
“ Angling is essentially the sport of the commonplace 
versifier.” — Some paper or other. 
Such is the verdict of the critic to whom the- 
(I have lost the paper and forgotten its name) 
entrusts its literary judgment. Is it a true bill? 
I, an angler from the age of six years, yearn¬ 
ing, years before I was able to afford a rod, 
like a hart for the water brooks, I own I have 
long suspected something of the sort. But I 
kept silence, though it was pain and grief unto 
me. I did not wish to set up my unfortified 
opinion against that of the rest of the angling 
public. Once, years back, I broke out in the 
columns of the Fishing Gazette in a protest 
against some of the more blatant of the brutali¬ 
ties and insincerities by which some sections of 
the angling press were degraded. As a result, I 
was overwhelmed with columns of indignant 
protest from gentlemen like Mr. Pritt and others, 
who, if they had reflected for one moment, 
must have known that they were neither guilty 
nor assailed. I am about perhaps to dare more 
greatly again. In the debate of this matter I am 
taking upon me the affirmative. I may be 
swamped with instances to the contrary. No one 
would be better pleased than I, if the grand jury 
of readers of the Fishing Gazette find good 
reason to throw out the bill. But, as at present 
advised, I say there is no body of angling poetry 
worthy of the name. 
1 believe this to be equally true of shooting, 
and, indeed, of every sport, even including hunt¬ 
ing. But that does not absolve the angling com¬ 
munity. We claim,many of us I think with justice, 
that there is more poetry in our pursuit than in all 
the other sports put together. We claim that 
the poetry is in our natures, and that it finds its 
best fruition in the pursuit of angling. Yes, but 
where is its expression in verse ? Is it impossible 
for us to say in verse the true and noble things 
which are of the essence of the poetry which 
should be welling up within us ? Are we simply 
a huge mutual admiration society ? If so, we 
are frauds, and the sooner we understand it and 
mend our ways the better. But this cannot be 
wholly true, as witness the sweet and gracious 
prose of Senior, Kingsley, Lang, and others. I 
can find you passages of Francis Francis that are 
compact of the spirit of poetry. But again I 
ask, where is the verse in which that spirit might 
be expected to find expression? Since “The 
Angler’s \Vi8h” of Izaak Walton what has 
there been in angling verse to equal or approach 
it ? The “ Angler ” of Thomson is often quoted 
with approval; but read it and consider it. How 
inverted the language, how pompous and inflated 
the style ! Who in describing the hooking of a 
trout would say, “ He, desperate, takes the 
death.” The description is accurate enough after 
we have pissed— 
“ Long time he, following, cautious scans the fly, 
And oft attempts to seize it, but as oft 
The dimpled water speaks his jealous fear ” 
—but the whole piece seems to me redolent of 
that form of insincerity in which the thing said 
is much less important than the way of saying it. 
I have tried to read a good deal of angling 
verse at one time and another, but, with the 
utmost goodwill to the subject, I have generally 
had to put the book down in despair, and never 
have come upon anything overpassing respectable 
mediocrity. In an age where mastery of metrical 
form (as distinct from the poetic spirit) is more 
universal than ever before, the standard of work¬ 
manship in angling verse is lamentably low. Is 
there any gentleman of taste and reading who is 
not of my mind on this ? 
I have said in the past, and it will bear repeti¬ 
tion, that Isaak Walton had much to answer for, 
and that if he had known for how much imitation 
he would be made responsible he would have kept 
his “Com pleat Angler” out of print. Imitation is a 
species of dry rot which has ruined, and will ruin, 
the style of myriads of angling writers, both of 
prose and verse. An imitation cannot be sincere, 
and insincerity is the death of style, the murder 
of interest, both in poetry and prose. If a man 
has anything in him to communicate to the world, 
he will have a better and a more direct way of 
communicating it given to him by nature, than 
any imitation of another can supply. I have 
read acres of description of scenery, palpably 
false. The writer had not the beauty and the 
glory and the glow of it in him. How then could 
he put it out on to his page? It was padding, 
the merest pretence—I daresay he was paid for it. 
No, Walton is good, but he is unique, and until 
we get away from him and cultivate our own way 
of saying things there will be no progress for us. 
I do not mean that we are to strive after 
originality, that is as often a pretence as imita¬ 
tion, and is almost as deadly to sincerity, but we 
should “ humbly strive to utter forth aright the 
music of our nature.” Campbell called poetry 
“the eloquence of truth,” and truer word was 
never said. Just as religions, as they grow old, 
have a tendency to stereotype themselves in con¬ 
ventional forms from which the spirit gradually 
departs, in set prayers which are heedlessly 
gabbled, in canticles that are sung without 
understanding, so in angling we find a number of 
stock phrases which may have been living once, 
but have long become devitalised, and they hang 
in the literature of angling like a dead weight. 
The keeping up of such phrases is a form of 
imitation that cannot exist with the sincerity 
essential to literature. Let us purge our writing 
of these cant terms. Every reader will know 
what 1 mean. 
Another pitfall for the angling writer is senti¬ 
ment. A dangerous thing to play with, never to 
be sought of malice prepense, never to be dragged 
in neck and crop. Nature is the truest guide, and 
nature is always sincere. 
Then there is a proneness to jocosity, often of 
a feeble order, generally more or less stereotyped, 
which some find it hard to resist. It is long 
indeed since I read a new angling joke—I don’t 
want to. I could wish the whole body of them 
dead and buried with no arrangements for a 
resurrection. Anglers would not be a less pleasant 
or humorous folk for the sacrifice. 
I may seem to some to have strayed a long way 
from my subject, but I hope to show that there is 
method in my madness. In dealing at length 
with the drawbacks, or some of them, which 
handicap the angling writer, have I not given 
reasons against the evolution of the writer of 
angling poetry ? 
No, it may be retorted, for your reasons on 
your own showing do not apply to angling prose 
—the best angling prose that is. Well, there is 
something in that. Does it not drive us to seek 
in the nature of poetry something which dis¬ 
qualifies it as a vehicle for angling pictures, or 
something in the nature of angling which dis¬ 
qualifies it as a subject for poetry. The latter 
none of us would admit. Is not the truth to be 
found in the fact that the artificial nature of 
verse, and the exigencies of rhyme and metre, are 
apt to force upon the writer some of those inver- 
