eche ydle persone whyche wolde desire it yf it were enpryntyd
allone by itself & put in a lytyll plaunflet therfore I have compylyd it
in a greter volume of dyverse bokys concernynge to gentyll & noble men
to the entent that the forsayd ydle persones whyche sholde have but
lytyll mesure in the sayd dysporte of fyshyng sholde not by this meane
utterly dystroye it.

EMPRYNTED AT WESTMESTRE BY WYNKYN THE WORDE THE YERE THYN-CARNACON OF
OUR LORD M.CCCC.LXXXXVI.

Reprinted by Thomas White, Crane Court

MDCCCXXVII.

WALTER BESANT

(1838-)

Walter Besant, born in Portsmouth, England, in 1838, did not begin his
career as a novelist till he was thirty years old. His preparation for
the works that possess so certain a maturity of execution, with as
certain an ideal of performance, was made at King's College, London, and
afterwards at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he took mathematical
honors. Abandoning his idea of entering the Church, he taught for seven
years in the Royal College of Mauritius. Ill health compelled his return
to England, and he then took up literature as a profession. His first
novel he had the courage to burn when the first publisher to whom he
showed it refused it.

But the succeeding years brought forth 'Studies in Early French Poetry,'
a delicate and scholarly series of essays; an edition of Rabelais, of
whom he is the biographer and disciple, and, with Professor Palmer, a
'History of Jerusalem,' a work for which he had equipped himself when
secretary of the Palestine Exploration Fund.

[Illustration: WALTER BESANT]

Mr. Besant was also a student in another special field. He knew his
Dickens as no other undergraduate in the University knew that branch of
polite literature, and passed an examination on the 'Pickwick Papers'
which the author declared that he himself would have failed in. By these
processes Mr. Besant fitted himself mentally and socially for the task
of story-telling. The relations of a man of letters to the rest of the
world are comprehensively revealed in the long list of his novels.

From the beginning he was one who comes with a tale "which holdeth
children from play and old men from the chimney corner"; nor is the
charm lessened by the sense of a living and kindly voice addressing the
hearer. His novels are easy reading, and do not contain an obscure
sentence. As art is an expression of the artist's mind, and not a rigid
ecclesiastical canon, it may be expressed in