"Sitting like patience on a monument,"
and selling the remnant of his life below cost price in the pursuit of
angling,--that "art of ingeniously tormenting,"--a feeling,
"More in sorrow than in anger,"
is excited at his profitless inhumanity.
Vainly do all the disciples of honest Izaak Walton discourse, in
eulogistic strains, of the pleasure of the sport. I can imagine neither
pleasure nor sport derivable from the infliction of pain upon the meanest
thing endowed with life.
This may be deemed Brahminical, but I doubt that man's humanity who can
indulge in the cruel recreation and murder while he smiles.
"What, heretical sentiments," exclaims some brother of the angle, (now I
am an angle, but no angler.) "This fellow hath never trudged at early
dawn along the verdant banks of the 'sedgy lea,' and drunk in the dewy
freshness of the morning air. His lines have never fallen in pleasant
places. He has never performed a pilgrimage to Waltham Cross. He is, in
truth, one of those vulgar minds who take more delight in the simple than
the--gentle!--and every line of his deserves a rod!"