The Compleat Angler.
I am told that it is generally though silently admitted that, while Charles Cotton came of a school of fishermen renowned for accomplishment even now, his master and friend was not in the modern or Cottonian sense a fisherman at all. There was in him, indeed, a vast deal of the philosopher and the observer of nature and still more, perhaps, of the artist in English; but there was also not a little of the cockney sportsman. He never rose above the low-lived worm and quill; his prey was commonly those fish that are the scorn of the true angler, for he knew naught of trout and grayling, yet was deeply interested in such base creatures (and such poor eating) as chub and roach and dace; and that part of his treatise which has still a certain authority—which may be said, indeed, to have placed the mystery of fly-fishing upon something of a scientific basis—was not his work but that of ‘my most honoured friend, Charles Cotton, Esq.’ Again, it is a characteristic of your true as opposed to your cockney sportsman that, unless constrained thereto by hunger, he does not eat what he has killed; and
it is a characteristic of Walton—who in this particular at least may stand for the authentic type of the cockney sportsman as opposed to the true one—that he delighted not much less in dining or supping on his catch than he did in the act of making it: as witness some of the most charming parts in a book that from one end to the other is charm and little besides. Indeed the truth—(with reverence be it spoken)—appears to be that the Compleat Angler is an expression in the terms of art of the cit’s enjoyment of the country.