Note 193 — The Auction Room.

The reader may see all this, and much more, dressed in its ancient orthographic garb, in a proheme to the first edition of the merry art of fishing, extracted by Herbert in his first volume, p. 131. I have said the "merry," and not the "contemplative," art of fishing—because we are informed that "Yf the angler take fyshe, surely thenne is there noo man merier than he is in his spyryte!!" Yet Isaac Walton called this art, "The Contemplative Man's Recreation." But a book-fisherman, like myself, must not presume to reconcile such great and contradictory authorities.