Page:John Buchan - Musa Piscatrix.djvu/23

of the poetry of the green world. In old times, the Greeks were not a people who loved angling, though Homer makes a bare mention of it, and Theocritus has a spirited fishing idyll; no more were the Romans, though Horace uses the sport to turn a metaphor, and Ausonius has much interesting and mythic learning about the habits of fishes. San Gemignano sang prettily of March as the month for fishing and cheerful company, and Sanazsaro has "Piscatory Eclogues"; in Holland we have lampoons on unfortunate fishermen, together with some commonplace praise of the art; but it is really only in this land of ours that we find any quality of permanence in the poetry of angling. Dennys and Phineas Fletcher and their kind, Browne with his pleasant pastorals, Walton and all his band of musicians who have left us one of the most memorable hooks in the language, Gay and Thomson, Smollett and Armstrong and the eighteenth century school, Scott and the Romantics, down past Wordsworth and Hood to Charles Kingsley and Mr Andrew Lang—all have left us some legacy of song on the most delightful of all sports.