Page:John Buchan - Musa Piscatrix.djvu/24

It is a fine sight to see how the Muse of angling tricks herself out in each of the fashions of the day. Under the Stuarts she masqueraded in sober habit, loving the meadows and little riverside inns and the quiet of the country. She affected a taste for theology and favoured her talk with grave thoughts from the Scriptures and divines whose tastes were not too high for fishing. She was a bit of a scholar in her way, and would cite you learned instances from Pliny and Gesnerius, and vary the whole in the most charming fashion with a gipsy song or the snatch of a milk-maid's chorus. That was the golden age of angling, the hey-day of its fortunes. It passed, and there succeeded the periwigged times of Gay and Thomson, when the angler had the indescribable air of a poetic property, set down in a landscape to give it a "human interest." Still Gay wrote with vigour, and Thomson had been at the fishing before, if the gusto of his description goes for anything. This, the age of silver, slipped past in turn, and now we are entered on the age of iron, when the fisherman is a drone among the industrious, and the works of man trespass so far on the