This “gentle river” meanders through countless spots of surprising beauty and variety within ten miles of town. When I was a boy I thought “Sadler’s Well’s arch,” opposite the “Sir Hugh Myddelton,” (a house immortalized by Hogarth,) the prime part of the river; for there, by the aid of a penny line, and a ha’porth of gentles and blood-worms, “mixed,” bought of old Turpin, who kept the little fishing-tackle shop, the last house by the river’s side, at the end next St. John’s-street-road, I essayed to gudgeon gudgeons. But the “prime” gudgeon-fishing, then, was at “the Coffin,” through which the stream flows after burying itself at the Thatched-house, under Islington road, to Colebrooke-row, within half a stone’s throw of a cottage, endeared to me, in later years, by its being the abode of “as much virtue as can live.” Past the Thatched-house, towards Canonbury, there was the “Horse-shoe,” now no more, and the enchanting rear—since despoiled—of the gardens to the retreats of Canonbury-place; and all along the river to the pleasant village of Hornsey, there were delightful retirements on its banks, so “far from the busy haunts of men,” that only a few solitary wanderers seemed to know them. Since then, I have gone “over the hills and far away,” to see it sweetly flowing at Enfield Chase, near many a “cottage of content,” as I have conceived the lowly dwellings to be, which there skirt it, with their little gardens, not too trim, whence the inmates cross the neat iron bridges of the “New River Company,” which, thinking of “auld lang syne,” I could almost wish were of wood. Further on, the river gracefully recedes into the pleasant grounds of the late Mr. Gough the antiquary, who, if he chiefly wrote on the manners and remains of old times, had an especial love and kind feeling for the amiable and picturesque of our own. Pursuing the river thence to Theobalds, it presents to the “contemplative man’s recreation,” temptations that old Walton himself might have coveted to fall in his way: and why may we not “suppose that the vicinity of the New River, to the place of his habitation, might sometimes tempt him out, whose loss he so pathetically mentions, to spend an afternoon there.” He tells “the honest angler,” that the writing of his book was the “recreation of a recreation,” and familiarly says, “the whole discourse is, or rather was, a picture of my own disposition, especially in such days and times as I have laid aside business, and gone a fishing with honest Nat. and R. Roe; but they are gone, and with them most of my pleasant hours,—even as a shadow that passeth away and returns not.”
I dare not say that I am, and yet I cannot say that I never was, an angler; for I well remember where, though I cannot tell when, within a year, I was enticed to “go a fishing,” as the saying is, which I have sometimes imagined was derived from Walton’s motto on the title of his book:—“Simon Peter said, I go a fishing: and they said, we also will go with thee.—John xxi. 3.” This passage is not in all the editions of the “Complete Angler,” but it was engraven on the title-page of the first edition, printed in 1653. Allow me to refer to one of “captain Wharton’s almanacs,” as old Lilly calls them in his “Life and Times,” and point out what was, perhaps, the earliest advertisement of Walton’s work: it is on the back of the dedication leaf to “Hemeroscopeion: Anni Æræ Christianæ 1654.” The almanac was published of course in the preceding year, which was the year wherein Walton’s work was printed.
Advertisement of Walton’s Angler, 1653.
“There is published a Booke of Eighteen-pence price, called The Compleat Angler, Or, The Contemplative man’s Recreation: being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing. Not unworthy the perusall. Sold by Richard Marriot in S. Dunstan’s Church-yard Fleetstreet.”
This advertisement I deem a bibliomaniacal curiosity. Only think of the first edition of Walton as a “booke of eighteen-pence price!” and imagine the good old man on the day of publication, walking from his house “on the north side of Fleet-street, two doors west of the end of Chancery-lane,” to his publisher and neighbour just by, “Richard Marriot, in S. Dunstan’s Churchyard,” for the purpose of inquiring “how” the book “went off.” There is, or lately was, a large fish in effigy, at a fishing-tackle-maker’s in Fleet-street, near Bell-yard, which, whenever I saw it, after I first read Walton’s work, many years ago, reminded me of him, and his pleasant book, and its delightful ditties, and brought him before me, sitting on “a primrose bank” turning his “present thoughts into verse”
The Angler’s Wish.
I in these flowery meads would be:
These crystal streams should solace me;
To whose harmonious bubbling noise
I with my angle would rejoice:
Sit here, and see the turtle-dove
Court his chaste mate to acts of love:
Or, on that bank, feel the west wind
Breathe health and plenty: please my mind,
To see sweet dew-drops kiss these flowers,
And then washed off by April showers;
Here, hear my Kenna sing a song;
There, see a blackbird feed her young,
Or a leverock build her nest:
Here, give my weary spirits rest,
And raise my low-pitch’d thoughts above
Earth, or what poor mortals love:
Thus, free from law-suits and the noise
Of princes’ courts, I would rejoice: