Charles Cotton - Fishing

Fishing

His friendship with Izaak Walton began about 1655, and contradicts the assumptions about Cotton's character based on his coarse burlesques of Virgil and Lucian. Walton's initials, made into a cipher with Cotton's own, were placed over the door of Cotton's fishing cottage on the Dove near Hartington. Cotton contributed a second section "Instructions how to angle for a trout or grayling in a clear stream", to Walton's The Compleat Angler; the additions consisted of twelve chapters on fishing in clear water, which he understood largely but not exclusively to be fly fishing. Another addition to the volume was Cotton's well-known poem "The Retirement", which appeared from the 5th edition onwards.

Read more about this topic:  Charles Cotton

Famous quotes containing the word fishing:

    The hill farmer ... always seems to make out somehow with his corn patch, his few vegetables, his rifle, and fishing rod. This self-contained economy creates in the hillman a comparative disinterest in the world’s affairs, along with a disdain of lowland ways. “I don’t go to question the good Lord in his wisdom,” runs the phrasing attributed to a typical mountaineer, “but I jest cain’t see why He put valleys in between the hills.”
    —Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    O mud
    For watermelons gutted to the crust,
    Mud for the mole-tide harbor, mud for mouse,
    Mud for the armored Diesel fishing tubs that thud
    A year and a day to wind and tide; the dust
    Is on this skipping heart that shakes my house,
    Robert Lowell (1917–1977)

    If fishing is a religion, fly fishing is high church.
    Tom Brokaw (b. 1940)