practice of which he
may happen to approve. My young friend Edward Ayer has a noble
collection of books relating to the history of American aboriginals and
to the wars waged between those Indians and the settlers in this
country; my other young friend Luther Mills has gathered together a
multitude of books treating of the Napoleonic wars; yet neither Ayer
nor Mills hath ever slain a man or fought a battle, albeit both find
delectation in recitals of warlike prowess and personal valor. I love
the night and all the poetic influences of that quiet time, but I do
not sit up all night in order to hear the nightingale or to contemplate
the astounding glories of the heavens.

For similar reasons, much as I appreciate and marvel at the beauties of
early morning, I do not make a practice of early rising, and sensible
as I am to the charms of the babbling brook and of the crystal lake, I
am not addicted to the practice of wading about in either to the danger
either to my own health or to the health of the finny denizens in those
places.

The best anglers in the world are those who do not catch fish; the mere
slaughter of fish is simply brutal, and it was with a view to keeping
her excellent treatise out of the hands of the idle and the
inappreciative that Dame Berners incorporated that treatise in a
compendious book whose cost was so large that only "gentyll and noble
men" could possess it. What mind has he who loveth fishing merely for
the killing it involves--what mind has such a one to the beauty of the
ever-changing panorama which nature unfolds to the appreciative eye, or
what communion has he with those sweet and uplifting influences in
which the meadows, the hillsides, the glades, the dells, the forests,
and the marshes abound?

Out upon these vandals, I say--out upon the barbarians who would rob
angling of its poesy, and reduce it to the level of the butcher's
trade! It becomes a base and vicious avocation, does angling, when it
ceases to be what Sir Henry Wotton loved to call it--"an employment for
his idle time, which was then not idly spent; a rest to his mind, a
cheerer of his spirits, a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet
thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness, and a
begetter of habits of peace and patience in those that professed and
practised it!"

There was another man I should like to have met--Sir Henry Wotton; for
he was an ideal angler. Christopher North, too ("an excell