And to-day? We are an audience in some ways not unlike that for which [Isaak] Walton wrote. We, too, live in times of wars and of ideological struggle, when civilisation, perhaps the world itself, seems threatened with its end, and that calm book of innocent happiness [The compleat angler], that pure, limpid prose of his, addressed in days of strife to all who hate contentions, is like a lark singing in the blue sky, high over no-man's-land, above the acrid smoke and the thunder of guns.