s would have been complete, and
their bravery of a more generous sort, had they possessed self-denial
enough to look the argument in the face, and abstained from procuring
themselves pleasure at the expense of a needless infliction. The charge
is not answered by the favorite retorts about effeminacy, God's
providence, neighbors' faults, and doing "no worse." They are simple
beggings of the question. I am not aware that anglers, or sportsmen in
general, are braver than the ordinary run of mankind. Sure I am that a
great fuss is made if they hurt their fingers; much more if they lie
gasping, like fish, on the ground. I am equally sure that many a man who
would not hurt a fly is as brave as they are; and as to the reference to
God's providence, it is an edge-tool that might have been turned against
themselves by any body who chose to pitch them into the river, or knock
out their brains. They may lament, if they please, that they should be
forced to think of pain and evil at all; but the lamentation would not
be very magnanimous under any circumstances; and it is idle, considering
that the manifest ordination and progress of things demand that such
thoughts be encountered. The question still returns: Why do they seek
amusement in sufferings which are unnecessary and avoidable? and till
they honestly and thoroughly answer this question, they must be content
to be looked upon as disingenuous reasoners, who are determined to
retain a selfish pleasure.

As to old Izaak Walton, who is put forward as a substitute for argument
on this question, and whose sole merits consisted in his having a taste
for nature and his being a respectable citizen, the trumping him up into
an authority and a kind of saint is a burlesque. He was a writer of
conventionalities; who, having comfortably feathered his nest, as he
thought, both in this world and in the world to come, concluded he had
nothing more to do than to amuse himself by putting worms on a hook, and
fish into his stomach, and so go to heaven, chuckling and singing
psalms. There would be something in such a man and in his book,
offensive to a real piety, if that piety did not regard whatever has
happened in the world, great and small, with an eye that makes the best
of what is perplexing, and trusts to eventual good out of the worst.
Walton was not the hearty and thorough advocate of nature he is supposed
to have been. There would have been something to say for him on that
score, had he