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Page 21
There was another man I should like to have met--Sir Henry
Wotton; for he was an ideal angler. Christopher North, too (``an
excellent angler and now with God''!)--how I should love to
have explored the Yarrow with him, for he was a man of vast soul,
vast learning, and vast wit.
``Would you believe it, my dear Shepherd,'' said he, ``that my
piscatory passions are almost dead within me, and I like now to
saunter along the banks and braes, eying the younkers angling, or
to lay me down on some sunny spot, and with my face up to heaven,
watch the slow-changing clouds!''
THERE was the angling genius with whom I would fain go angling!
``Angling,'' says our revered St. Izaak, ``angling is somewhat
like poetry--men are to be born so.''
Doubtless there are poets who are not anglers, but doubtless
there never was an angler who was not also a poet. Christopher
North was a famous fisherman; he began his career as such when he
was a child of three years. With his thread line and bent-pin
hook the wee tot set out to make his first cast in ``a wee
burnie'' he had discovered near his home. He caught his fish,
too, and for the rest of the day he carried the miserable little
specimen about on a plate, exhibiting it triumphantly. With
that first experience began a life which I am fain to regard as
one glorious song in praise of the beauty and the beneficence of
nature.
My bookseller once took me angling with him in a Wisconsin lake
which was the property of a club of anglers to which my friend
belonged. As we were to be absent several days I carried along a
box of books, for I esteem appropriate reading to be a most
important adjunct to an angling expedition. My bookseller had
with him enough machinery to stock a whaling expedition, and I
could not help wondering what my old Walton would think, could he
drop down into our company with his modest equipment of hooks,
flies, and gentles.
The lake whither we went was a large and beautiful expanse, girt
by a landscape which to my fancy was the embodiment of poetic
delicacy and suggestion. I began to inquire about the chub,
dace, and trouts, but my bookseller lost no time in telling me
that the lake had been rid of all cheap fry, and had been stocked
with game fish, such as bass and pike.
I did not at all relish this covert sneer at traditions which I
have always reverenced, and the better acquainted I became with
my bookseller's modern art of angling the less I liked it. I
have little love for that kind of angling which does not admit of
a simultaneous enjoyment of the surrounding beauties of nature.
My bookseller enjoined silence upon me, but I did not heed the
injunction, for I must, indeed, have been a mere wooden effigy to
hold my peace amid that picturesque environment of hill, valley,
wood, meadow, and arching sky of clear blue.
It was fortunate for me that I had my ``Noctes Ambrosianae''
along, for when I had exhausted my praise of the surrounding
glories of nature, my bookseller would not converse with me; so I
opened my book and read to him that famous passage between Kit
North and the Ettrick Shepherd, wherein the shepherd discourses
boastfully of his prowess as a piscator of sawmon.
As the sun approached midheaven and its heat became
insupportable, I raised my umbrella; to this sensible proceeding
my bookseller objected--in fact, there was hardly any reasonable
suggestion I had to make for beguiling the time that my
bookseller did not protest against it, and when finally I
produced my ``Newcastle Fisher's Garlands'' from my basket, and
began to troll those spirited lines beginning
Away wi' carking care and gloom
That make life's pathway weedy O!
A cheerful glass makes flowers to bloom
And lightsome hours fly speedy O!
he gathered in his rod and tackle, and declared that it was no
use trying to catch fish while Bedlam ran riot.
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