Have you read The Compleat Angler? If you have, and are also acquainted with the Author's other writings, then these pages may perchance refresh your remembrance of them; but their object and the hope of the writer is to make Walton and a few earlier angling writers known to some to whom they are only names.

Looking back through a life, a never-failing delight of which has been the devouring of books, I confess that not many have had such an enduring charm for me as those of Walton. His Compleat Angler is the first book I can remember reading. I have the edition before me now, one of those productions of the Chiswick Press, published in 1863 by Bell & Daldy and Sampson Low & Co.; and though I have seen nearly all of the hundred or more reprints of the Angler, and possess most of the best, this little half-bound, well-worn edition will always be among those most prized.

I must have been born with a love of angling. I certainly caught Prussian carp in an old pond near to Craven Arms in Shropshire long before I could read. As a youngster of ten years I remember one wet day wondering whether any in that row of small books on the top shelf of a book-case in my father's library were interesting. Within reach were rows of Scott in green cloth with white labels; big volumes of Knight's “History of England”; then a regiment of Shakespeare in red; above them a charming American edition of Dickens in green cloth, published, I think, by Ticknor, Fields, & Osgood. These and many others were to be a discovery later on. Who can forget the first coming under the spell of the Wizard of the North, or of Dickens, the Wizard of the South? To me, then, these were only repellent by reason of their big battalions. But away above them was this row of little books. I could just read the titles of some from the floor. I remember Southey's “Nelson,” White's “Selborne,” George Herbert's “Poems,” Milton's “Paradise Lost.” These did not appeal much to a schoolboy's idea of books to read. But suddenly I noticed in gold letters the word Angler, and from the top of a chair I saw the full title was Walton and Cotton's Complete Angler. By George! perhaps that's about fishing, I thought; and stepping from the chair on to the smooth, rounded, mahogany cover of the writing-desk which formed the lower half of the book-case, I clutched the little volume, and then came down with a crash on the floor. It was some little time before I felt equal to opening my find; but when I did, and found I had got three hundred pages about fish and rivers and ponds, I forgot my bumps, I forgot everything as I listened to the voice of the dear old Master. If I had only studied my school-books as I did Walton! I remember some years after, one hot summer day, when my old schoolmaster, the Rev. Mr. H———, was perspiring with the heat and his endeavour to make some lines of Xenophon's “Anabasis” clear to a fat Irish boy, that, thinking his attention would be engaged for some time, I propped up the lid of my desk as a screen, and was soon deep in dearly beloved Walton. The loud voice of the master and the hesitating answers of the boy soon faded away, and I was watching Piscator kill that big chub with the white spot on his tail, when bang went the master's cane on his oak desk. I looked round my sheltering desk-lid only to find, in perfect silence, the whole eyes of the class on me, and then, with Xenophon upraised in hand ready to hurl at my head, came the thundering “Marston! what book have you got there?” Prepared at any moment to avoid Xenophon by a judicious “duck down,” I said, “Please, sir, it's Walton's Complete Angler.” “Walton's Angler,” repeated the master, and a pleasant change came over the flushed and angry but always jolly face. “Come up here, sir, and let me look at it.” I went up with some misgivings, for the four-foot cane was not put down with Xenophon; in fact, “old H———,” as we irreverently called him, seemed to be trying its balance as he would a fly-rod. “Ah! a very pretty edition”; and after some little time, “And are you a fisherman?” I proudly said I was; and then we had a regular talk about fishing, and I related how during the recent holidays I had lost a five-pound chub. “What, sir! How do you know he was five pounds, if you lost him?” “Well, sir, I think—I believe he would have weighed near six, if I had caught him.” “That will do, sir”; and with, as I thought, a half-suppressed twinkle in his eye, “Don't let me catch you again.” After school, when we were talking about my escape, some of the fellows said, “Didn't you know he was a fisherman? Well, if you want a holiday any time, tell him you're going fishing, and if that don't fetch him nothing will.” I had only recently been moved up into Mr. H———'s class, so I was not aware that he was as keen an angler as he was jolly and kind-hearted—though cane he could, and did. When morning lessons were half through, each master liberated his class for a quarter of an hour. At the end of the fifteen minutes a bell rang, and we of H———'s class knew if we did not clear out of the playground at once we should have to “run the gauntlet!” Mr. H———, in his college cap and gown, stood at the side of the open door. We had to rush past one at a time, and endeavour by fleetness or strategy to avoid the flying cane. Never was the wisdom of “festina lente” more impressed on one; for the greater your speed in endeavouring to escape the cane, the faster the master must make his cut to avoid missing the victim. It was better to hasten slowly in close single file—better for all but the last man!

One of my first essays in fly-fishing was for dace in the Thames from the meadows opposite Kew Gardens. These meadows are intersected by deep dykes. There was a school of girls walking along the towing-path on the opposite side of the river. As I was moving along the bank, I suppose I must have been looking at the girls, or I should not have suddenly gone bodily into a dyke six feet deep. Luckily, the tide was low, and the mud was soft; but I did not venture to reappear until the ripples of laughter from across the water had grown faint in the distance. But I caught some fine dace, I remember; for on my way home, when I got to Waterloo Bridge, which then had a toll-gate on it, I had not even a half-penny to pay the gatekeeper. But St. Peter is the friend of fishermen, and the offer of some silvery dace in lieu of toll-money was accepted with alacrity.

I have mentioned these small matters because I think if one undertakes to give some account of a favourite author, it will not, at any rate, lessen any interest in what you write, if you can show that your acquaintance with the subject is a familiar one; and I think I may claim to know something practically about angling, from fly-fishing for salmon down to sniggling for eels. Every holiday I have had has been spent in some part of these beautiful Islands,—often after the big wary trout and grayling of Hampshire and other south-country streams, many times to the sweet south country which divides the Bristol from the English Channel, among the vales and dales of Derbyshire and Yorkshire, in the delightful Border country, among Scotch and Irish lake districts and Highland salmon rivers, through the Snowdon land, after big pike in the Midlands; in fact, everywhere and anywhere that offered a chance of good fishing. Nor have fish always been the only object of my angling expeditions: often enough it has been to explore some delightful valley referred to in some old writer, or to fish for rare old books on angling in the old bookshops. Beware of taking to collect books on angling. You will find yourself become so attached to the fascinating hobby, that you would, if necessary, pawn the shirt off your back to obtain some coveted edition. Not that one might not select a thousand worse ways of investing time and money than in forming an angling library; for these little shabby volumes of the sixteenth and seventeenth and of earlier and later centuries are growing in value at a marvellous pace.

There is a steady and increasing demand in the United States of America for old books on angling, and indeed on sport generally; and it is pleasant to know that the love of out-door sport of all kinds is so strong among the sons and daughters of the great Republican branch of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is this constant drain to America which makes these books become scarcer every year. When I first began collecting, one could secure a good copy of the first edition of Walton for £20 or £30. Now it is worth five or six times as much. The fact is, these books never come back into the English market. An Englishman makes a collection; but sooner or later he dies, and the chances are that his collection is dispersed among other English collectors by being sold at auction; and I am convinced it is not so much the competition of English collectors, as the gradual exhaustion of the stock in this country by the Americans, which makes old books on angling fetch a higher price than any other class of book.

Only the other day I purchased a fine copy of Walton's second edition (even rarer than the first): its late owner would not part with it until he had my assurance that it was for my own collection, and not to go to America. “I do not see,” he said, “why all our rarest books should go to America.”

It may be well to warn collectors that there exist some uncommonly clever spurious editions of Walton, made by aid of photography in Germany. When I say clever, they would not deceive any one who had any acquaintance with a genuine first edition; but few of the many hundreds of collectors have any chance of seeing that, and I know from experience that there are unscrupulous secondhand booksellers. On one occasion, when passing an old book-shop, I looked in, as usual, to see if any fishing-books were for sale. After being shown some common modern editions, the bookseller remembered he had an old Walton upstairs—a first edition. He could not find it, but promised to send it on. The price was ridiculously low, if it proved in good condition; and I congratulated myself on having secured a “find.” But the book never came; and on calling for it, I was informed there was doubt about its genuineness. There was none until I gave my address.

The art of photography has rendered the manufacture of spurious “early editions” a game worth the candle, so that a word of warning in this respect will not be out of place. I was asked £25 for one worth about 5s. only the other day.

For this little work generally I will only claim that it deals at greater length with the principal works referred to than is the case in any other single volume. It would have been easy to give many more references in praise of Walton and his writings, but “enough is as good as a feast.” That it is published in the three hundredth year since Walton's birth is an accident: it was begun before that “tercentenary” was thought of by me. Indeed, although I have printed on the front of “The Fishing Gazette” the date of Walton's birth and death every week for getting on for twenty years now, it was not until Dr. Henshall, who has charge of the angling exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair, wrote to me a month or two ago to say that they intended to celebrate Walton's birthday (as described in his letter to me, quoted on p. 104), that my attention was drawn to the interest connected with August 9th, 1893.