The Sun.
London, England, 1833-07-09 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

MAXIMS and HINTS for an ANGLER.
LONDON. JOHN MURRAY. 1833.
SALTER' S ANGLER'S GUIDE. WICKSTED,
OLD COMPTON STREET, SOHO-SQUARE.

There is no sort of amusement in which

theory and practice are so utterly at variance as
in angling. They differ as much as if they were
fashionable man and wife. In theory angling is
one of the most enchanting sports possible; we
associate it with a thousand agreeable and pic-
turesque ideas—the fresh breeze, the green,
sunny meadows, with a translucent stream wind-
ing like a silver thread through them ; cows
(which Paul Potter turns to such account, and
which tell so well in all landscapes) standing
knee deep under a willow, in some broad, shal-
low ford : boys and girls, perhaps rolling among
hay-cocks ; the mellow, distant uplands ; and in
the fore-ground, a cottage with a mill haul by,
at whose open lattice, where a blackbird sings
in a wicker cage, sits some jolly angler
quaffing a glass of home-brewed, by way of
recotnpence for his last hour's exploits, while
a fine trout, or pike, or salmon lies gasping
in the basket at his feet. Such is the agreeable
nature of the associations which most novices
mix up with angling. But it is one thing to
read about the sport in the fascinating pages
of old Isaac Walton, and another to be practi-
cally acquainted with it. Unless a man have a
world of patience ; a perseverance that nothing
can subdue ; a constitution that no fatigues can
impair ; and above all, an enthusiasm that no
annoyances can quench ;—unless a man possess
each and all of these qualifications, he will find
angling the most tedious, thankless amusement
possible, insipid as Lord Ellenborough's fiercest
phillippics, and dull as Lord Londonderry's
brightest jokes.
Dr. Johnson, who, we suspect, never knew
what it was to hook a spanking trout, has de-
fined angling as a stick and a string, with a worm
at one end and a fool at the other. We cannot
hold with this ultra definition—though there is
much truth in it—for some of the greatest and
best men we ever had were anglers. Paley was
an angler (and it must have been an edifying
spectacle to see the Rev. Author of the " Evi-
dences of the Christian Religion" bobbing in
his clerical wig, and with spectacles on that knob
which he called a nose, for gudgeon) ; Walton,
Cotton, Sir J. Hawkins, and Charles Fox were
anglers ; so were Mackenzie and Walter Scott,
and so are James Hogg and Professor Wilson.
It is, therefore, a classical sport, if it have no

other recommendation.
Nevertheless, we can conceive nothing so de-
plorable as the situation of a man who turns
" Piscator " wholly on the strength of what he
has read about it. His active fancy will be sure
to mislead him. Like the sons of Zebedee, he
will " toil all day and catch nothing" (unless it
be a cold or a sore throat), and get no bite, but
a gnat-bite. His green sunny meadows will bog
him up to the ankle ; his fine day will wet him
through to the skin ; of the picturesque cattle
which he read of with such delight in old
Isaac's pages, one, being a bull, will make a
point of running at him, and peradventure driv-
ing him right into the middle of " the purling
stream " and so spoiling his sport for the day,
by throwing all the fish into hysterics ; where he
looked for a cottage and a glass of home-brewed,
he will find only a beer-shop kept by a radical
as sour as his liquor ; and possibly, by way of
wind-up to the day's enjoyment, may be taken
up for a trespass on some litigious farmer's
lands, and being a stranger to the district, and
looking uncommonly like a vagabond by reason
of his being wet through, half-starved, yellow with
spleen, wasted with fatigue, and one mass of mud
from head to foot, be compelled to put in bail
for his appearance at the next quarter sessions 1
These, together with other miscellaneous mise-
ries—such as hooking the calf of one's own leg
in an abortive attempt to throw a fly genteelly ;
hauling up a huge weed in mistake for a trout ;
and being annoyed by the splash of a water-rat,
at the very moment that a fine fish was just
bolting one's bait—are a few among the hosts of '
annoyances which the rash novice, whom the
charms of its theory have induced to become
an angler, must make up his mind to encounter.
But there is a more serious annoyance still,
to which Mr. Salter, though, like all enthusiastic
Piscators, he is bent only on exhibiting the poetic
side of angling, has nevertheless felt himself'
bound to advert. In his " Angler's Guide"
(p. 360) he gives special " directions for the
recovery of drowned persons"—evidently think-
ing it far from improbable that a gentleman who
goes out to fish, may terminate his day's sport
by being fished up himself! Again, in p. 255,
he presents us with a fine half-length of a fero-
cious bull, who is standing beside a hedge, near
a stream—an apposite embellishment, by which
he would delicately insinuate, that if angling has
its pleasures it has also its hazards, its prose as
well as its poetry, of which a toss by a mad bull
is a delectable specimen.
On the natural history of river fish, Mr. Salter's
details are singularly copious and minute. Speak-
ing of pike, he says (on the authority of others)
that they " will grow to the amazing size of a
hundred and fifty pounds or more." A friend
of ours once got himself into a whimsical pre-
dicament by insisting on this very theory. Being
engaged to contribute an Essay on Angling to a
well-known Encyclopedia, and being something
of an ignoramus, he was rash enough to in-
sert an anecdote extracted from a note to an
old edition of Isaac Walton, descriptive of a pike
which was caught by the parish clerk, in a pool
near Lilleshall lime-works, and weighed upwards
of a hundred and seventy-five pounds ! Luckily,
just as the article was going to press, it caught
the Reader's eye, who, being a veteran in the art,
hurried off in an agony of apprehension to
expostulate with the luckless author. " This
story must never be published, Sir : it will ruin
the whole concern. What 1 catch a pike of a
hundred and seventy-five pounds weight ? My
God, Sir, lie must have been a shark, only to
be caught with a round of beef, and hauled up
by a steam-engine. Take my word for it, Sir,
there never was such a fish, and what's more,