The companion we want is the Angler's Companion. Now the angler is an individual who sallies out at early dawn, rejoicing, not only in his own strength, and, haply, the strength of a glass of whisky, but in a fishing-basket, or pannier, or bag; in a fishing-rod, or three or four fishing-rods; in a fishing-book, more voluminous in its single volume than the Encyclopædia Britannica; in wading boots and water-proof cloaklets; in a reel, and a gaff, and a landing net, and sometimes a boat; in gut, and in horse hair; in hooks and hackles; in feathers and silk thread; in wax and wire; in leads and floats; in tin boxes of worms, and earthen pots of salmon roe; in minnows, and parr-tails; in swivels and gorge-hooks; in lobs, and in bobs; in ferrules, and in rings; in a brown paper parcel of four large sandwiches, and a pocket flask of six large glasses of sherry; in a dingy coat, and inexpressible unmentionables; and finally, in the best humour, and a shocking bad hat. Is it imaginable that all this can be done, as it is done every day, by any body who has not made up his mind, or who thinks it necessary to know, what fish are, and where they came from? There is no such humbug within him. He goes to the Tweed or the Tay; the Don, or the Conan; to Loch Craggie, or Loch Maree; to Loch Awe, or Loch Etive; to the Clyde, or the Solway; to Loch Doon, or Loch Ken; because all over broad Scotland there is plenty of fish; and because, where-ever he goes, Stoddart can tell him how there most readily, most surely, and most pleasantly to encreel them. Of all the Caledonians who, in countless crowds, daily leave their native homes in the flesh, and return to the domestic hearthstone in the evening, with their flesh more or less fishified, there are not twenty to whom it is not a point of the utmost indifference, whether the fish in the Tweed, or any other river where they have been angling, are rained down once a month from the clouds, or are brought over as ballast in ships once a-week from Denmark. The fish are there. We are going to catch them. Hand us Stoddart's Angler's Companion. As a teacher of practical angling in Scotland, we look on Mr Stoddart to be without a rival or equal. To call him a good instructor in the art, does not properly describe him. He is strictly and literally a manuductor. Nature has given to him what Beddoes terms "a well organised and very pliant hand," which for more than twenty years, as we can honestly testify, has waved the osier over all the streams of his native country. We exaggerate nothing in declaring angling to have been, during that long period, Stoddart's diurnal and nocturnal study. And the result has been what it ought to be. Nobody else, for example, (we affirm it without fear of any contradiction or cavil,) could have written, as it is written, the sixth chapter,--"On fishing with the worm for trout."