The literature of England has this among other points in common with ancient literature, that it reckons books on fishing among its classics. Oppian, who sang of the sea and its inhabitants to Caracalla, is far from the worst among the Greek poets, and has in particular expressed the successful angler's exultation with a truth and terseness which no successor will surpass: [Greek: pollê gar blepharoisi kai en phresi terpsis idesthai pallomenon kai elissomenon pepedêmenon ichthyn.] Half a century later Nemesian gained equal fame among the Latins by a poem on the same theme, which has not come down to us. The piscatorial eclogues of Sanazzaro are an ornament of Italian literature, and were imitated by Milton in his _Lycidas_;[14] but the first and best modern poem on the technicalities of angling (_The Secrets of Angling_, by John Dennys, 1630) is English, and is one of the most pleasing didactic poems in the language. The subject was next to have been taken up by a better known writer, Sir Henry Wotton, but his intended work was never completed, and it remained for Izaak Walton, whom we have already met as an ecclesiastical biographer, to render it equally interesting to the professional fisherman and charming to the lover of idyllic pastoral. The first edition (1653) is wellnigh the most prized of all rare old English books. It had four more editions in the author's lifetime, all with additions and amendments, and it is needless to observe that it has retained its popularity to our day as completely as _Paradise Lost_ or _Pilgrim's Progress_. The technical details are no doubt sound, except for the author's defective acquaintance with fly-fishing; but the preservative against time has not been the didactic skill which others might rival or surpass, but the accompaniment of natural description and song and pictures of country life, conveyed in a style whose quaint simplicity, at once transparent and formal, is a survival from the old Elizabethan days, to which, with their pastorals and poetry, he himself looks back with so much affection: 'Look, under the broad beech-tree, I sat down, when I was last this way a-fishing, and the birds in the adjoining grove seemed to have a friendly contention with an echo, whose dead voice seemed to live in a hollow tree, near to the brow of that primrose-hill; there I sat viewing the silver streams glide silently towards their centre, the tempestuous sea; yet sometimes opposed by rugged roots and pebble-stones, which broke their waves, and turned them into foam: and sometimes I beguiled time by viewing the harmless lambs, some leaping securely in the cool shade, whilst others sported themselves in the cheerful sun; and saw others craving comfort from the swollen udders of their bleating dams. As I sat there, these and other sights had so fully possessed my soul with content, that I thought, as the poet has happily exprest it,