How far this virtue of your's has hitherto been extended towards those for whose instruction and delight the book was originally written, no one, who has ever seen the waters of Chilton, or heard with what care and expence they are preserved, can be ignorant. And, as this folicitude, for the mere amusement of anglers, a very small and inconfiderable part of mankind, is a peculiar strain of beneficence, so it affords a probable ground to hope, that a treatise on the art itself, written with so much judgment and ingenuity, and containing such abundant instruction and innocent entertainment as this does, can hardly fail of a favourable reception. Next to the fatisfaction of having restored to the world fo valuable a work, and having performed for Mr. Walton, an office he had frequently so well discharged for others, and which, for the honour of his memory, I could wish had been undertaken by some abler hand, I feel none greater, than the occafion it now gives me, of testifying my 1 ADVERTISEMENT. THE COMPLETE ANGLER having been written so long ago as 1653, although the last publication thereof. in the lifetime of the authors, was in 1676, contains many particulars of persons, now but little known, and frequent allusions to facts, and even modes of living, the memory whereof is in a great measure obliterated: a new edition therefore seemed to require a retrofpect to the time when the authors lived; an explanation of fuch paffages, as an interval of more than an hundred years had neceffarily rendered obfcure; together with fuch improvements in the art itself, as the accumulated experience of fucceeding times has enabled us to furnish. An edition, undertaken with this view, is now attempted, and in a way, it is to be hoped, that may once again introduce the authors to the |