This is my rare book, and it is rare for an excellent good reason, as will be shown. But first of the author. Mr. Thomas Tod Stoddart was born in 1810. He died in 1880. Through all his pilgrimage of three-score years and ten, his "rod and staff did comfort him," as the Scottish version of the Psalms has it; nay, his staff was his rod. He "was an angler," as he remarked when a friend asked: "Well, Tom, what are you doing now." He was the patriarch, the Father Izaak, of Scottish fishers, and he sleeps, according to his desire, like Scott, within hearing of the Tweed. His memoir, published by his daughter, in "Stoddart's Angling Songs" (Blackwood), is an admirable biography, _quo fit ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella Vita senis_. But it is with the "young Tom Stoddart," the poet of twenty, not with the old angling sage, that we have to do. Miss Stoddart has discreetly republished only the Angling Songs of her father, the pick of them being classical in their way. Now, as Mr. Arnold writes:-- "Two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood, One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude." The young Stoddart's two desires were poetry and fishing. He began with poetry. "At the age of ten his whole desire was to produce an immortal tragedy . . . Blood and battle were the powers with which he worked, and with no meaner tool. Every other dramatic form he despised." It is curious to think of the schoolboy, the born Romanticist, labouring at these things, while Gerard de Nerval, and Victor Hugo, and Theophile Gautier, and Petrus Borel were boys also--boys of the same ambitions, and with much the same romantic tastes. Stoddart had, luckily, another love besides the Muse. "With the spring and the May fly, the dagger dipped in gore paled before the supple rod, and the dainty midge." Finally, the rod and midge prevailed. "Wee dour-looking hooks are the thing, Mouse body and laverock wing." But before he quite abandoned all poetry save fishing ditties, he wrote and published the volume whose title-page we have printed, "The Death Wake." The lad who drove home from an angling expedition in a hearse had an odd way of combining his amusements. He lived among poets and critics who were anglers--Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd (who cast but a heavy line, they say, in Yarrow), Aytoun, Christopher North, De Quincey-- "No fisher But a well-wisher To the game,"