Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/382

 two more in the Huth and Denison libraries. The woodcut in the title represents an angler with a fish on his hook, and the motto, ‘Well fayre the pleasure that brings such treasure,’ and a man treading on a serpent with a sphere at the end of his rod and line labelled, ‘Hold hooke and line, then all is mine.’ ‘The dates of the second and third editions are still an open question’ ( in Notes and Queries, iv. 4, 92). The second is ‘augmented with approved experiments’ by Lauson, and has the same woodcut on the title. The date is conjectured to be about 1620 by Mr. Westwood. The only copy known (in the Denison collection) has the date ploughed off. The third edition, 1630? ‘printed at London for John’ [Jackson], has a slightly different woodcut, with a varied motto, ‘Well feare the Pleasure, That yeelds such Treasure.’ A copy is in the British Museum, obtained in 1882 from Mr. A. Denison in exchange for a copy of the fourth edition. The fourth edition, 1652, 12mo, London, ‘printed by T. H. for John Harison, and are to be sold by Francis Coles, at his shop in the Old Bayly.’ The woodcut in the title of the other editions here figures as frontispiece, the angler being dressed in the costume of a later period, and the flowers, foliage, &c., a little modified. There are two copies in the British Museum Library, and several others are known.

The ‘Secrets’ was reprinted in Sir E. Brydges's ‘British Bibliographer’ (1812, ii. 465). A hundred were struck off separately, edited by Mr. H. Ellis, in 1811. Much of the poem was also quoted in ‘Censura Literaria’ (1809, x. 266), which Daniel, after the usual fashion of angling writers, reproduced in his ‘Rural Sports.’ Mr. Arber reprinted a very imperfect version of it in his ‘English Garner’ (1877, i. 143). Mr. Thomas Westwood, who has long made a special study of J. D., reprinted verbatim the whole poem with an introduction of great value in 1883 (Satchell & Co.). In 1614 the ‘Secrets of Angling’ was transmuted into prose by Gervase Markham in his ‘English Husbandman,’ and appears also in his ‘Pleasures of Princes,’ and in others of his works. ‘It is proof of the vitality of Dennys's verse that it retains its strength, sweetness, and savour in its more sober form’.

As for the ‘Secrets of Angling’ itself, it is sufficient to say that no more musical and graceful verses were ever written on the art of angling. The author has chosen a measure at once sweet and full of power, and its interlinked melodies lure the reader onwards with much the same kind of pleasure as the angler experiences who follows the murmuring of a favourite trout-stream. The tone of the poem is religious. It is full of lofty sentiments and natural descriptions, a poetical atmosphere surrounding even the commonest tools of the angler's craft, and so often reminds us of Walton's style, that it is not perhaps wonderful to find that the ‘Secrets of Angling’ was a poem familiar to the ‘common father of all anglers.’ Canon Ellacombe has printed some ingenious speculations on the probability of Shakespeare having been acquainted with J. D.

[Lowndes's Bibliographer's Manual (Bohn), vol. ii. 1864; Hazlitt's Collections and Notes, 1876; Hazlitt's Handbook to the Pop. Literature of Great Britain, 1867; Arber's MSS. of the Stationers' Registers, 1876, iii. 237; Notes and Queries, 4th ser. iv. 91, 177; article by Mr. T. Westwood in The Angler's Note Book, p. 181 (Satchell, 1880); Westwood and Satchell's Bibliotheca Piscatoria; Collectanea Hunteriana, Chorus Vatum Anglicanorum, i. 328; Quarterly Review, No. 278, p. 353; Corser's Collectanea, v. 181; Athenæum, 7 April and 28 July 1883; Canon Ellacombe's Shakespeare as an Angler, p. 61.]  DENT, ARTHUR (d. 1607), puritan divine, matriculated as a pensioner of Christ's College, Cambridge, in November 1571, graduated B.A. in 1575–6, M.A. in 1579, and was on 17 Dec. 1580 instituted to the rectory of South Shoebury, Essex, on the presentation of Robert, lord Rich. In 1582 he was one of the witnesses examined in support of charges brought against Robert Wright, a puritan minister (, Annals, iii. 125, Append. 42, folio). About 1584 he was much troubled by Aylmer, his diocesan, for refusing to wear the surplice and omitting the sign of the cross in baptism. His name is appended to the petition sent to the lords of the council by twenty-seven ministers of Essex, who refused to subscribe the declaration ‘that there is nothing contained in the Book of Common Prayer contrary to the word of God’ (, Puritans, ii. 112, 275). He died of a fever after three days' illness about the end of 1607. He left a widow, who was probably a sister of Ezekiel Culverwell, as he is styled Dent's ‘brother.’ Culverwell, in dedicating an edition of the ‘Ruine of Rome’ to Lord Rich, remarks that to Dent's ‘diligence, yea, extreme and unwearied pains in his ministry, publicly, privately, at home and abroad, for at least four and twenty years, all our country can testify. … Besides all others his great labours, he had a special care of all the churches, night and day, by study and fervent prayer, procuring the prosperity of Zion and the ruin of Rome.’ He was esteemed an excellent preacher, and the popu- 