people, so little given to appetite, so instinctively sympathetic with the hungry and the needy, that we have no need to keep days of abstinence even once a week. Or if we do, out of mere Prayerbookolatry, we can easily order the fishmonger to supply us with Grimsby's best-or worst. But when a respectable body like the Camden Society is indifferent as to the barest accuracy in the treatment of fishes, what justice can we expect from meaner quill drivers? In the Italian relation of the Island of England, made in Henry VII's reign, we find the translator (one Charlotte Sneyd, and no angler for certain) thus renders the original. They have, as I read, and which has been confirmed to me by the inhabitants themselves, a great abundance of large rivers, springs and streams, in which are found every species of Italian fish, excepting however, carp, tench, and perch; but on the other hand they have a quantity of salmon a most delicate fish, which they seem to hold in great estimation, because these people greatly prefer sea fish; of which, indeed, they have many more than we have."

Carpioni, temoli, persici are the three words in the original. Carp is right, but

alas! for the others.

Temolo is the salmo

thymallus the grayling salmon, the violet blue and brown fellow which the Blessed St. Ambrose held up to us as a type of chas tity, and persica is the pesca fluvialis, still without name or habitation in these parts. The translator's conscience seems a little uneasy, for she puts a note to tell us that carps were introduced in 1514 by Leonard Mascal, or Marshal, of Sussex, but known before to Dame Juliana Berners, whereas tench and perch, if not indigenous to England were introduced before this time, and she refers us to an extract from the Duke of Buckingham's household expenses of seven years later, where two tenches fetch 14d, 7 little bremes, 14d, 21 little roaches, 8d, six large fresh eels, 3s. 4d., 100 lampreys, 10d., and so on. She also quotes, more to the purpose, the bill of fare in Henry VII's marriage feast, 1487, where we may espy "Pyk in latymer sawce, perche in jaloye depte and carpe in foile" and in the second course "Sturgynn fresh fenell."

Had the subject been worthy of research at all, she might have followed the bold perch back to the Heptarchy and heard him called Stickleback, and have detected tench

in half the fish-ponds of England. But our writers despise these creatures.

Even the Dictionaries are content with the most casual etymologies. The New English Dictionary has dissipated a world of lies by refusing to connect cod with gaddus, and perhaps if we live to see the roach dealt with we may gain a satisfaction which other dictionaries deny, for it is absurd to derive him from roche, a ray, or thorn-back, poor smooth thing! And I should be glad to know whether perca and perche give us perch, or whether barsch, barse, and boers, may not be the real parents of the English word. At anyrate there must be some connection between the two. Dictionaries are far too content with Johnson's curt method "carp, a pond fish," or with his snippets from Walton; and even the Century Dictionary is very weak upon its ichthyological side.

With regard to the Belles Lettres, we see the same phenomenon, Dame Juliana Berners, John Dennys, in his Secrets of Angling, Walton and Cotton, all serious literary writers, thought highly of all our fishes, not of those alone which are the sport of the selfish and the food of the

epicure. But now Angling has fallen from its music of letters. Those who write about it do so in the jolting prose of the twopenny bus. They are but tackle makers' hacks disguised as writers. They scrawl for those who want not to angle but to slay, and who prefer straight tips and lucid hints, in boldest coarsest terms, above the delicate flavours of praiseworthy skill and work."

The greatest pathos about our poor friends, is that they have fallen out of favour with the Muses, Summa miseria fuisse felicem. A quarter of a century back The Quarterly Review complained that "Angling as practised in England sadly wants a sacred bard. Why does no fisherman, hamis et reti potens, as familiar with all finny tribes as was Glaucus of old after tasting grass, cut himself a reed from the margin of his loved trout stream, and pipe a strain worthy of the subject?" Why? because angling as practised in England is a purse-proud, selfish thing, which can inspire no poetry until it becomes simple, personal and laborious, until men discover their own lures and make their own flies and fish with their own brains, until they take their angling more sacramentally and their business with

less grotesque fervour and more detach

ment.

Dr. Thomas Arnold, of Rugby fame, the inventor of automatic stuffing establishments for boys, could explain to the Reviewer why angling has no bard. That worthy person was so excited as to whether he did or did not believe in the Holy Catholic Church, and in similar transient questions, that he considered angling to be waste of time and in this he voiced the real view of the mighty middle classes, and the deep seriousness of the buttermen of all time. Hear him in his letter to Mr. Justice Coleridge, January 2, 1841. "If our minds were comprehensive enough and life were long enough to follow with pleasure every pursuit not sinful, I can fancy that it would be better to like shooting than not to like it; but as things are, all our life must be a selection, and pursuits must be neglected, because we have not time or mind to spare for them. So that I cannot but think that shooting and fishing in our state of society, must always be indulged at the expense of something better."

This, 'something better,' was the assiduous propagation of prigs, the evisceration of