Cruelty and Humour
him to be "a kind, humorous, and pious soul." Charles Lamb, who thought angling a cruel sport, wrote to Wordsworth, "Izaak Walton hallows any page in which his reverend name appears."
This admirable Crichton, this honoured guest of "eminent clergymen," was the man whom Byron—who had never so much as supped with a curate—selected to attack in his most scandalously indecent poem. His lilting lines,
"The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb in his gullet
Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it,"
were ribald enough in all conscience; but, by way of superdefiance, he added a perfectly serious note in which he pointed out the deliberate character of Walton's inhumanity. The famous passage in "The Compleat Angler," which counsels fishermen to use the impaled frog as though they loved him,—"that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live the longer,"—
259
