“Then there were billiards; cards, too; but no dice,
Save in the clubs no man of honor plays—
Boats when’twas water, skating when’twas ice,
And the hard frost destroy’d the scenting days;
And angling, too, that solitary vice,
Whatever Izaac Walton sings or says;
The quaint old cruel coxcomb in his gullet,
Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.”
Another famous satirist of the old school defines angling as “a stick and a string, with a fish at one end and a fool at the other,” while a third, the well-known Peter Pindar, in closing a “Ballad to a Fish in the Brook,” takes occasion to say:
“Enjoy thy stream, oh, harmless fish,