Could a man who contemned and denounced fishing so vigorously put into the mouth even of the pleader for the superior craftiness of fish, unless he himself had angled and possessed the true angling spirit, the following sentences, as true and as useful to-day as when written nineteen centuries ago?
“For the first and foremost, the cane of which the angle Rod is made, fishers wish not to have big and thick, and yet they need such an one as is tough and strong, for to pluck and hold the fishes, which commonly do mightily fling and struggle when they be caught, but they choose rather that which is small and slimmer, for fear lest if it catch a broad shadow, it might move the doubt and suspicion that is naturally in fishes.”
“Moreover, the line they make not with many water knots” (happy anglers!), “but desire to have it as plain and even as possibly may be, without any roughness, for that this giveth as it were some denuntiation unto them of fraud and deceit. They take order likewise that the hairs which reach to the hook should seem as white as possibly they can devise, for the whiter they be the less are they seen in the water for their conformity and likeness in colour to it.”[396]
We anglers seem of a verity “nae gleg at the uptak.” After some 1650 years we find John Whitney, in the preface to The Genteel Recreation: or the Pleasure of Angling, ascribing with modesty as to personal prowess, but quiet pride as to discovery, his success very largely to the use of “fine Tackling” which in the poem (!) he further, if in barbarous verse, enforces,
“Fineness in Angling’s th’ Anglers nearest Rule: For Prudence must still regulate in all.”[397]
The sentence in his Preface is apposite to many a Preface, whether in prose or verse. “As to the verse there is fault and folly enough, but grant Poetical License, if in pleasing nobody I have pleased myself, and that’s all the reward I desire,” for alas! to many of us writers self-pleasing must be the sole reward of our desert, if not of our desire.
Misrepresentation as a despiser of fishing and fishermen has clutched another victim, Dr. Johnson, of all people! As Plutarch has been branded for an opinion not his own, so Johnson has been held guilty of the famous libel—“A worm at one end and a fool at the other.” The popular belief is all false. According to Boswell, he was very appreciative—an attitude not always Johnsonian—of Walton’s work.
Again, it was no other than he[398] who urged Moses Browne to bring out in 1750 a new edition—the fifth and last was published in 1676—of The Compleat Angler, of which his criticism, “a mighty pretty book,” hardly indicates contempt for its subject, or author, whose life he once meant writing.
On Voltaire also the Worm-Fool libel has also been saddled, but wrongly. To another Frenchman, Martial Guyet, it has been attributed, but not convincingly.
In Notes and Queries, 3rd series, X. 472, can be found the lines: