Note 242 — Chapter V
Reading edition
Byron’s view of fishing is not favourable—as his lines in Don Juan, Canto XIII. prove:
“Angling, too, that solitary vice, Whatever Isaak Walton says or sings.”
He bore, possibly from failure to catch his boyish Aberdeenshire trout, a grudge against Father Izaak,
“The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb in his gullet Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.”
Byron closes his note with “But Anglers! No Angler can be a good man.” Walton received many a shrewd blow, especially from his contemporary Richard Franck, whose Northern Memories, with its appreciation of the Fly and its depreciation of Izaak’s ground-bait, found less favour than the Compleat Angler. His worsting of Walton at Stafford runs, “he stop’d his argument and leaves Gesner to defend it: so huff’d a way.” Again, “he stuffs his book with morals from Dubravius—not giving us one precedent of his own experiments, except otherwise when he prefers the trencher to the troling-rod! There are drones that rob the hive, yet flatter the bees that bring them honey.”