This little hook can scarcely claim for itself the proud title of an anthology. It is no serious collection of all the fishing songs in our literature judiciously estimated and edited; but only a small sheaf of the shorter, and, let me hope, the choicer verses gleaned from a narrow field. Some of the poems are mere lonely stanzas, a few scarcely so great; some have a taint of the humorous, others some admixture of the pathetic; all, I trust, possess the fragrance and piquancy of poetry which busies itself with things not far removed from the tastes of humankind. I have purposely taken little from any single writer, save in the case of Thomas Tod Stoddart, who is the poet-laureate of angling: and I have sought only to include verse which has some of the higher elements of poetry. When this is not so, it is because some interest of another kind attaches to the versifier or
