IX. To Master Isaak Walton

Father Isaak,--When I would be quiet and go angling it is my custom to carry
in my wallet thy pretty book, 'The Compleat Angler.' Here, methinks, if I find
not trout I shall find content, and good company, and sweet songs, fair
milkmaids, and country mirth. For you are to know that trout be now scarce,
and whereas he was ever a fearful fish, he hath of late become so wary that
none but the cunningest anglers may be even with him.

It is not as it was in your time, Father, when a man might leave his shop in
Fleet Street, of a holiday, and, when he had stretched his legs up Tottenham
Hill, come lightly to meadows chequered with waterlilies and lady-smocks, and
so fall to his sport. Nay, now have the houses so much increased, like a
spreading sore (through the breaking of that excellent law of the
Conscientious King and blessed Martyr, whereby building beyond the walls was
forbidden), that the meadows are all swallowed up in streets. And as to the
River Lea, wherein you took many a good trout, I read in the news sheets that
'its bed is many inches thick in horrible filth, and the air for more than
half a mile on each side of it is polluted with a horrible, sickening stench,'
so that we stand in dread of a new Plague, called the Cholera. And so it is
all about London for many miles, and if a man, at heavy charges, betake
himself to the fields, lo you, folk are grown so greedy that none will suffer
a stranger to fish in his water.

So poor anglers are in sore straits. Unless a man be rich and can pay great
rents, he may not fish, in England, and hence spring the discontents of the
times, for the angler is full of content, if he do but take trout, but if he
be driven from the waterside, he falls, perchance, into evil company, and
cries out to divide the property of the gentle folk. As many now do, even
among Parliament, men, whom you loved not, Father Isaak, neither do I love
them more than Reason and Scripture bid each of us be kindly to his neighbour.
But, behold, the causes of the ill content are not yet all expressed, for even
where a man hath licence to fish, he will hardly take trout in our age, unless
he be all the more cunning. For the fish, harried this way and that by so many
of your disciples, is exceeding shy and artful, nor will he bite at a fly
unless it falleth lightly, just above his mouth, and floateth dry over him,
for all the world like the natural _ephemeris_. And we may no longer angle
with worm for him, nor with penk or minnow, nor with the natural fly, as was
your manner, but only with the artificial, for the more difficulty the more
diversion. For my part I may cry, like Viator in your book, 'Master, I can
neither catch with the first nor second Angle: I have no fortune.'

So we fare in England,