The sentence in his Preface is apposite to many a Preface, whether in prose or verse. “As to the verse there is fault and folly enough, but grant Poetical License, if in pleasing nobody I have pleased myself, and that’s all the reward I desire,” for alas! to many of us writers self-pleasing must be the sole reward of our desert, if not of _our_ desire. Misrepresentation as a despiser of fishing and fishermen has clutched another victim, Dr. Johnson, of all people! As Plutarch has been branded for an opinion not his own, so Johnson has been held guilty of the famous libel—“A worm at one end and a fool at the other.” The popular belief is all false. According to Boswell, he was very appreciative—an attitude not always Johnsonian—of Walton’s work. Again, it was no other than he[398] who urged Moses Browne to bring out in 1750 a new edition—the fifth and last was published in 1676—of _The Compleat Angler_, of which his criticism, “a mighty pretty book,” hardly indicates contempt for its subject, or author, whose life he once meant writing. On Voltaire also the Worm-Fool libel has also been saddled, but wrongly. To another Frenchman, Martial Guyet, it has been attributed, but not convincingly. In _Notes and Queries_, 3rd series, X. 472, can be found the lines: “Messieurs, je suis pêcheur, et pêcheur de la ligne, J’en fait ici l’aveu. Ce cas semble peu digne De vos graves esprits: car on l’a dit souvent La ligne, avec sa canne, c’est un long instrument Dont le plus mince bout tient un petit reptile, Et dont l’autre est tenu par un grand imbécile!” “These lines were written by Guyet, who if he were Martial Guyet died nearly one hundred years before the great lexicographer was born.”[399] Even before Guyet the libel seems to have become hackneyed, “_car on l’a dit souvent_.” Plutarch’s works figure so frequently in these pages that I will not here specially dwell on or quote from them, except “once more the tale to tell” of Antony and Cleopatra’s fishing as given in his _Life of Antony_, 29, 2. Antony (who “fishes, drinks, and wastes the lamps of night in revel”), when with Cleopatra on the Nile had, of course, if Beaumont and Fletcher’s lines hold, not been half as successful as his mistress: “She was used to take delight, with her fair hand To angle in the Nile, where the glad fish, As if they knew who ’twas sought to deceive them, Contended to be taken.”[400] To shine in her eyes, he secretly commanded his diver to attach fish to his hook. Cleopatra, becoming aware of the trick, signalled her diver to go down (or as some others relate, bribed Antony’s own servants) to affix to his hook, a _salted_ fish (τάριχος). This he promptly struck and hauled out mid laughter and ridicule. “Leave,” cried Cleopatra, “leave the fishing rod to us; your game is Cities, Provinces, and Kingdoms.”[401] Shakespeare makes Cleopatra’s diver attach the salted fish: