The mediæval writer, Paolo Giovio, dwells at length on the enormous fish to be seen 350 years ago in the depths of Lake Como, and states that trout of 100 lbs. and over were no uncommon objects.[332]
What a prospect of joyous, easeful sport is opened here! No tedious travel of days or weeks to Norway, Canada, or New Zealand; no sleepless roughing it under tent or shack; no diet of canned food; no being “bitten off in chunks” by mosquito or black fly. Think of it, O Angler of high hope, but of sore disappointment—of hard toil and weary waiting! Think of it! To wake, after sound slumber, in one’s own comfortable room: to seize the ready rod, and with one dexterous cast, “almost from your very bed,” to be fast in a hundred-pound trout!
“Than which no more in deed, or dream!”
Martial’s abiding love for his birthplace on the picturesque banks of the River Salo in Spain (the delights of which in Ep., XII. 18, and I. 49, he paints with happy enthusiasm to Rome-tied Juvenal and to Licinianus) probably accounts for Angling being mentioned more appreciatively by him than by any other Latin poet.
Angling was one of the favourite amusements of men like Martial, a yeoman (if I may differ from Prof. Mackail[333]) —to judge from the frequent references made to his own farm—or at any rate a close observer of the class, which in Ep. I. 55, he so well describes:
“Hoc petit, esse sui nec magni ruris arator, Sordidaque in parvis otia rebus amat.”
For in this same epigram and many others the poet is fain
“Ante focum plenas explicuisse plagas, Et piscem tremula salientem ducere seta.”
To him these rank among the chief delights of country life, which life he, though an admirable flâneur, places higher than all else.
He ends his vivid sketch of it with the passionate burst—“Let not the man who loves not this life, love me, and let him go on with his city life—white as his own toga!”[334]