fish in his water.

So poor anglers are in sore straits. Unless a man be rich and can
pay great rents, he may not fish in England, and hence spring the
discontents of the times, for the angler is full of content, if he
do but take trout, but if he be driven from the waterside, he falls,
perchance, into evil company, and cries out to divide the property
of the gentle folk. As many now do, even among Parliament-men, whom
you loved not, Father Isaak, neither do I love them more than Reason
and Scripture bid each of us be kindly to his neighbour. But,
behold, the causes of the ill content are not yet all expressed, for
even where a man hath licence to fish, he will hardly take trout in
our age, unless he be all the more cunning. For the fish, harried
this way and that by so many of your disciples, is exceeding shy and
artful, nor will he bite at a fly unless it falleth lightly, just
above his mouth, and floateth dry over him, for all the world like
the natural ephemeris. And we may no longer angle with worm for
him, nor with penk or minnow, nor with the natural fly, as was your
manner, but only with the artificial, for the more difficulty the
more diversion. For my part I may cry, like Viator in your book,
"Master, I can neither catch with the first nor second Angle: I
have no fortune."

So we fare in England, but somewhat better north of the Tweed, where
trout are less wary, but for the most part small, except in the
extreme rough north, among horrid hills and lakes. Thither, Master,
as methinks you may remember, went Richard Franck, that called
himself Philanthropus, and was, as it were, the Columbus of anglers,
discovering for them a new Hyperborean world. But Franck,
doubtless, is now an angler in the Lake of Darkness, with Nero and