The Anatomy of Melancholy

The accounts of the Turkish officials employed for this purpose are astonishing: how many thousands of men are engaged in it, how many hawks of every kind, how much revenue is spent on that sport alone, and how much time is devoted to it each year at Adrianople alone. The Persian kings hunt butterflies with sparrows and starlings trained for that purpose. They have smaller hawks for smaller game and larger ones for the rest, so that they can prolong their sport through every season.

The emperors of Muscovy train eagles to pursue hinds, foxes, and the like; one such eagle was sent as a present to Queen Elizabeth. Some people tame ravens, kestrels, magpies, and so forth, and accustom them to handling for their amusement.

Fowling takes more trouble, but gives some people every bit as much pleasure, whether they use guns, birdlime, nets, clearings, traps, strings, baits, pitfalls, pipes, birdcalls, stalking horses, setting dogs, decoy ducks, or other means. Some greatly enjoy taking larks with day nets, small birds with chaff nets, and plovers, partridges, herons, snipe, and so on.

Henry III, king of Castile, as Mariana the Jesuit reports in book 3, chapter 7, was very fond of catching quails. Many gentlemen take particular pleasure in going out morning and evening with their quail pipes, and will go to any trouble to gratify this taste. The Italians have gardens equipped for the purpose, with nets, bushes, and clearings; they spare neither expense nor effort, and are passionately fond of the sport.

Tycho Brahe, the great astronomer, in his geographical description of his island of Hven and castle of Uraniborg, describes his nets and way of catching small birds as an attractive feature and a recreation in which he sometimes took part himself.

Fishing is a kind of hunting in water, whether with nets, basket traps, baits, a rod and line, or other means. It gives some people every bit as much pleasure as dogs or hawks: “when they draw their fish onto the bank,” says Nicholas Hensel in chapter 3 of his Description of Silesia, speaking of his countrymen’s extraordinary delight in fishing and making ponds. James Dubravius, the Moravian, relates in his book On Fish that, travelling along a highway in Silesia, he found a nobleman wearing boots up to his groin, wading, hauling nets, and working as hard as any of the fishermen.

When someone apparently objected that his occupation was beneath him, he defended himself: if other men might hunt hares, why should he not hunt carp? In the same way, many gentlemen in our country will wade up to their armpits on such occasions, freely undertaking for their own pleasure what a poor man could scarcely be hired to do for a good wage.

Plutarch, in his book On the Intelligence of Animals, speaks against all fishing as a filthy, low, ungentlemanly occupation, involving neither ingenuity nor discernment, and not worth the trouble. But anyone who considers the variety of baits for every season and the ingenious devices our anglers have invented—special lines, artificial flies, various techniques, and so forth—will say that it deserves equal praise, requires as much study and discernment as the other sports, and should be preferred to many of them.