The unfailing charm of the book lives in its delicately clear descriptions of the country and of rural life; in its quaint pastoral scenes, like the interview with the milkmaid and her mother, and the convocation of gipsies under the hedge; and in its sincerely happy incitements to patience, cheerfulness, a contented spirit, and a tranquil mind. In its first form the book opened with a dialogue between Piscator and Viator; but later this was revised to a three-sided conversation in which Venator, a hunter, and Auceps, a falconer, take the place of Viator and try valiantly to uphold the merits of their respective sports as superior to angling. Of course Piscator easily gets the best of them, (authors always have this power to reserve victory for their favourites,) and Auceps goes off stage, vanquished, while Venator remains as a convert and willing disciple, to follow his “Master” by quiet streams and drink in his pleasant and profitable discourse. As a dialogue it is not very convincing, it lacks salt and pepper; Venator is too easy a convert; he makes two or three rather neat repartees, but in general, he seems to have no mind of his own. But as a monologue it is very agreeable, being written in a sincere, colloquial, unaffected yet not undignified manner, with a plenty of digressions. And these, like the by-paths on a journey, are the pleasantest parts of all. Piscator’s talk appears easy, unconstrained, rambling, yet always sure-footed, like the walk of one who has wandered by the little rivers so long that he can move forward safely without watching every step, finding his footing by a kind of instinct while his eyes follow the water and the rising fish. But we must not imagine that such a style as this, fluent as it seems and easy to read as it is for any one with an ear for music, either comes by nature or is attained without effort. Walton speaks somewhere of his “artless pencil”; but this is true only in the sense that he makes us forget the processes of his art in the simplicity of its results. He was in fact very nice in his selection and ordering of words. He wrote and rewrote his simplest sentences and revised his work in each of the five earlier editions, except possibly the fourth. Take, for example, the bit which I have already quoted from the “address to the reader” in the first edition, and compare it with the corresponding passage in the fifth edition: “I am the willinger to justify _the pleasant part of it_, because, _though it is known I can be serious at reasonable times_, yet the whole discourse is, _or rather was_, a picture of my own disposition, _especially_ in such days and times as I _have laid aside business, and gone a-fishing with_ honest Nat. and R. Roe; _but they are gone, and with them most of my pleasant hours, even as a shadow that passeth away and returns not_.” All the phrases in italics are either altered or added.