The Every-Day Book has presented a more striking view of the changes of manners and customs than any book which has gone before it; yet even the editor himself, I think, never dreamed of this revolution of habits extending from the walkers on the earth to the inhabitants of “the waters which are under the earth.”
How little do men dream, when they are advocating the cause of any class of people, in what manner those very people shall repay their services. Poor Izaak Walton! He cried up anglers as the very perfection of human nature. They were the most meek, loving, and patient of God’s creatures. They were too much imbued with nature’s tranquillizing spirit to be ambitious; too excellent christians to be jealous; and all this, good, simple-hearted fellow as he was, because he was such a man himself. I have naturally great faith in the influence of nature, and, therefore, though I never could resist a smile at Izaak’s zealous eulogies on the art—calling all times, people, and places, to do honour to it; pressing kings, prophets, apostles, and even Jesus Christ himself, into the ranks of his admired anglers—yet, I involuntarily permitted his warm and open-hearted eloquence to more than half persuade me of the superior natures of his piscatorial protegées; in short, that they were such men as himself.
In one of my summer rambles through the peak of Derbyshire I entered Dovedale. It was in June, and on one of the most delightful evenings of that delightful month. There had been rain in the day, and the calm splendour of the declining sun fell upon a scene not more fantastically sublime in its features, than it was beautiful in its freshness. The air was deliciously cool, balmy, and saturated with the odour of flowers. The deep grass in the bottom of the valley was heavy with its luxuriance. The shrubs waved and sparkled, with their myriad drops, upon lofty crags and stern precipices; and the Dove, that most beautiful of swift and translucent streams, went sounding on its way with a voice of gladness in full accordance with every thing around it. I have seen it many times,—and the finest scenes, often seen, are apt to lose some of their effect,—yet I never felt more completely the whole fascination of the place. It put me, as such things are apt to do, into a ruminating and poetical mood,—a humour to soliloquize and admire, and to see things perhaps a little more fancifully than an etymologist, or a mathematician might.
It was exactly when that species of ephemera, the drake-fly, the glory of trouts and of trout-takers, was in season. They were fluttering by thousands over the stream, and dropping every moment into it, where many a luxuriating mouth was ready to receive them. The anglers were half as numerous as they; from the bottom of Dove-dale to Berresford Hall, the whilom residence of Cotton, and the resort of Walton, scarcely a hundred yards but “maintained its man.” I pleased myself with fancying I saw amongst them many a face which belonged to a disciple of Izaak worthy of the master and the art, and, had I not entered into talk with them, I might have thought so now.
But, I asked one if there was not once a very famous angler, who frequented the Dove. “Oh aye!” said he, “I know whom you mean; you mean old Dennel Hastings. For fishing and shuting he was the cob of all this country!” Alas! poor Izaak! I thought; but I glanced at the man’s fish-basket as I passed. It was empty, and I set him down as a fellow not more ignorant of Izaak than of the patient mystery. But soon after, I cast my eye upon an old and venerable figure. His basket was stored with beautiful trouts, till the lid would not shut down. His grey hair clustered thick and bushily beneath his well-worn hat, as if it was accustomed to grow in the sun and the breeze, and to be “wet with the dews of heaven.” His features were such as the father of anglers himself might have worn,—good; and apparently accustomed to express a mixed spirit of bonhommie and simplicity, but were then sharpened into the deepest intensity of an angler’s vigilant enjoyment. This, thought I, is surely the man, and I asked him if he had read “Walton’s Complete Angler.” Yes, he had it, and he had Major’s new edition, too: and, turning to me with an air of immense knowingness and importance, said—“If he was alive now he could not take a single fin.” “No,” I replied, “how is that? He could take plenty in his day; and though I do not deny that there may have been great improvement in the art, yet, skill then successful would be equally so now, unless there has been a revolution amongst the fish, and they have grown wiser. “Ay, there you have it,” he added, the fish are wiser: they wont take the same baits.” I instinctively glanced at the bait then upon the hook of my oracle, and—heaven and earth! it was Walton’s favourite bait—the drake-fly. I walked on. The romance of angling was destroyed. The glory, like a morning dream, had passed away from the whole piscatorial race; and, from esteeming an angler after the fashion of Izaak Walton, I fell into great temptation of deeming him something worse than, as exhibited in Swift’s definition, “a stick and a string, a worm at one end and a fool at the other.”
Nottingham.
W. H.
Now, as the sun declines, may be seen, emerging from the surface of shallow streams, and lying there for a while till its wings are dried for flight, the (misnamed) May-fly. Escaping, after a protracted struggle of half a minute, from its watery birth place, it flutters restlessly up and down, up and down, over the same spot, during its whole era of a summer evening; and at last dies, as the last dying streaks of day are leaving the western horizon. And yet, who shall say that in that space of time it has not undergone all the vicissitudes of a long and eventful life? That it has not felt all the freshness of youth, all the vigour of maturity, all the weakness and satiety of old age, and all the pangs of death itself? In short, who shall satisfy us that any essential difference exists between its four hours and our fourscore years[206]?