"Take that fish off the hook, Palinurus," he proudly said. "It is
not as large as I thought, but it looks like the oldest one that has
been caught to-day."
Such, in effect, is the tale narrated by the veracious Plutarch.
And if any careful critic wishes to verify my quotation from memory,
he may compare it with the proper page of Langhorne's translation; I
think it is in the second volume, near the end.
Sir Walter Scott, who once described himself as
"No fisher,
But a well-wisher
To the game,"
has an amusing passage of angling in the third chapter of
REDGAUNTLET. Darsie Latimer is relating his adventures in
Dumfriesshire. "By the way," says he, "old Cotton's instructions,
by which I hoped to qualify myself for the gentle society of
anglers, are not worth a farthing for this meridian. I learned this
by mere accident, after I had waited four mortal hours. I shall
never forget an impudent urchin, a cowherd, about twelve years old,
without either brogue or bonnet, barelegged, with a very indifferent
pair of breeches,--how the villain grinned in scorn at my landing-
net, my plummet, and the gorgeous jury of flies which I had
assembled to destroy all the fish in the river. I was induced at
last to lend the rod to the sneering scoundrel, to see what he would
make of it; and he not only half-filled my basket in an hour, but
literally taught me to kill two trouts with my own hand."
Thus ancient and well-authenticated is the superstition of the
angling powers of the barefooted country-boy,--in fiction.
Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, in that valuable but over-capitalized
book, MY NOVEL, makes use of Fishing for Allegorical Purposes. The
episode of John Burley and the One-eyed Perch not only points a
Moral but adorns the Tale.
In the works of R. D. Blackmore, angling plays a less instructive
but a pleasanter part. It is closely interwoven with love. There
is a magical description of trout-fishing on a meadow-brook in ALICE
LORRAINE. And who that has read LORNA DOONE, (pity for the man or
woman that knows not the delight of that book!) can ever forget how
young John Ridd dared his way up the gliddery water-slide, after
loaches, and found Lorna in a fair green meadow adorned with
flowers, at the top of the brook?
I made a little journey into the Doone Country once, just to see
that brook and to fish in it. The stream looked smaller, and the
water-slide less terrible, than they seemed in the book. But it was
a mighty pretty place after all; and I suppose that even John Ridd,
when he came back to it in after years, found it shrunken a little.
All the streams were larger in our boyhood than they are now,
except, perhaps, that which flows from the sweetest spring of all,
the fountain of love, which John Ridd discovered beside the
Bagworthy River,--and I, on the willow-shaded banks of the Patapsco,
where the Baltimore girls fish for gudgeons,--and you? Come, gentle
reader, is there no stream whose name is musical to you, because of
a hidden spring of love that you once found on its shore? The
waters of that fountain never fail, and in them alone we taste the
undiminished fulness of immortal youth.
The stories of William Black are enlivened with fish, and he knew,
better than most men, how they should be taken. Whenever he wanted
to get two young people engaged to each other, all other devices
failing, he sent them out to angle together. If it had not been for
fishing, everything in A PRINCESS OF THULE and WHITE HEATHER would
have gone wrong.
But even men who have been disappointed in love may angle for solace
or diversion. I have known some old bachelors who fished
excellently well; and others I have known who could find, and give,
much pleasure in a day on the stream, though they had no skill in
the sport. Of this class was Washington Irving, with an extract
from whose SKETCH BOOK I will bring this rambling dissertation to an
end.
"Our first essay," says he, "was along a mountain brook among the
highlands of the Hudson; a most unfortunate place for the execution
of those piscatory tactics which had been invented along the velvet
margins of quiet English rivulets. It was one of those wild streams
that lavish, among our romantic solitudes, unheeded beauties enough
to fill the sketch-book of a hunter of the picturesque. Sometimes
it would leap down rocky shelves, making small cascades, over which
the trees threw their broad balancing sprays, and long nameless
weeds hung in fringes from the impending banks, dripping with
diamond drops. Sometimes it would brawl and fret along a ravine in
the matted shade of a forest, filling it with murmurs; and, after
this termagant career, would steal forth into open day, with the
most placid, demure face imaginable; as I have seen some pestilent
shrew of a housewife, after filling her home with uproar and ill-
humour, come dimpling out of doors, swimming and courtesying, and
smiling upon all the world.
"How smoothly would this vagrant brook glide, at such times, through
some bosom of green meadow-land among the mountains, where the quiet
was only interrupted by the occasional tinkling of a bell from the
lazy cattle among the clover, or the sound of a woodcutter's axe
from the neighbouring forest!
"For my part, I was always a bungler at all kinds of sport that
required either patience or adroitness, and had not angled above
half an hour before I had completely 'satisfied the sentiment,' and
convinced myself of the truth of Izaak Walton's opinion, that
angling is something like poetry,--a man must be born to it. I
hooked myself instead of the fish; tangled my line in every tree;
lost my bait; broke my rod; until I gave up the attempt in despair,
and passed the day under the trees, reading old Izaak, satisfied
that it was his fascinating vein of honest simplicity and rural
feeling that had bewitched me, and not the passion for angling."
[Up] [Chapter7part1] [Chapter7part2] [Chapter7part3]
[Home] [Chapter 1] [Chapter 2] [Chapter 3] [Chapter 4] [Chapter 5] [Chapter 6] [Chapter 7] [Chapter 8] [Chapter 9] [Chapter 10] [Chapter 11] [Chapter 12]