014 IMMORTALITY
Princeton University, or to be more explicit, Dr. Gerald Eades Bentley of Princeton, says Alistair Cooke, American correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, has found Walton,- beloved • master of angling, a fake. Seventy-six years before The Corn- pleat Angler was published, an anonymous writer produced a work which contained passages said to have been almost completely reproduced in Walton's immortal treatise. Ah well, let it be said that although the master may be discredited in the eyes, of pedants and 'bibliophiles, his ghot can never be exorcised from the peaceful world of fishing. He belongs to the streams and quiet ono's, and his detractors have no more hope of removing him from his place of honour, and our conception of the seventeenth-cen- tury riverside,' than Baconians have of putting their
'candidate's name in lights' in Stratford. I began my fishing, I might almost say, with The C'ornpleat Angler
in my hand, and I dgfy anyone who has the tiniest part of poet or philoscipher in him to read it and not want to take up the gentle art and fish for fat
chub or trout. Does it signify anything that what
Walton said had been said before, even in as many words? Shades of Dame Berners, does it matter?
No 'one' who daydreams about fishing would change 'Anon.' for Walton, or see less be,auty in The Corn- pleat Antler even for a moment,
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