  Few men who have written books have been able to win so large a share of the personal affection of their readers as honest Izaak Walton has done, and few books are laid down with so genuine a feeling of regret as the "Complete Angler" certainly is, that they are no longer. "One of the gentlest and tenderest spirits of the seventeenth century," we all know his dear old face, with its cheerful, happy, serene look, and we should all have liked to accompany him on one of those angling excursions from Tottenham High Cross, and to have listened to the quaint, garrulous, sportive talk, the outcome of a religion which was like his homely garb, not too good for every-day wear. We see him, now diligent in his business, now commemorating the virtues of that cluster of scholars and churchmen with whose friendship he was favoured in youth, and teaching his young brother-in-law, Thomas Ken, to walk in their saintly footsteps,—now busy with his rod and line, or walking and talking with a friend, staying now and then to quaff an honest glass at a wayside ale-house—leading a simple, cheerful, blameless life "Thro' near a century of pleasant years."[1] We have said that the reader regrets that Walton should have left so little behind him: his "Angler" and his Lives are all that is known to most. But we are now enabled to present those who love his memory with a collection of fugitive pieces, in verse and prose, extending in date of composition over a period of fifty years,—beginning with the Elegy on Donne, in 1633, and terminating only with his death in 1683. All these, however unambitious, are more or less characteristic of the man, and impregnated with the same spirit of genial piety that distinguishes the two well-known books to which they form a supplement. Walton's devotion to literature must have begun at an early age; for in a little poem, entitled The Love of Amos and Laura, published in 1619, when he was only twenty-six, and attributed variously to Samuel Purchas, author of "The Pilgrims," and to Samuel Page, we find the following dedication to him:— "TO MY APPROVED AND MUCH RESPECTED FRIEND, IZ. WA."To thee, thou more then thrice beloved friend, "If they were pleasing, I would call them thine, "S.P." [2]What poems Walton wrote in his youth, we have now no means of knowing; it has not been discovered that any have been printed, unless we adopt the theory advocated by Mr. Singer,[3] and by a writer in the "Retrospective Review,"[4] that the poem of Thealma and Clearchus, which he published in the last year of his life, as a posthumous fragment of his relation John Chalkhill, was really a juvenile work of his own. Some plausibility is lent to this notion by the fact that Walton speaks of the author with so much reticence and reserve in his preface to the volume, and also that in introducing two of Chalkhill's songs into the "Complete Angler," he does not bestow on them the customary words of commendation. This theory has been rebutted by others, who assert that Walton was of too truthful and guileless a nature to resort to such an artifice. We confess that we are unable to see anything dishonest in the adoption, as a pseudonym, of the name of a deceased friend, or anything more than Walton appears to have done on another occasion when he published his two letters on "Love and Truth." It is certain, however, that a family of Chalkhills existed, with whom Walton was closely connected by his marriage with the sister of Bishop Ken. But that an "acquaintant and friend of Edmund Spenser," capable of writing such a poem as Thealma and Clearchus, should have kept his talents so concealed, that in an age of commendatory verses no slightest contemporary record of him exists—is, to say the least, extraordinary. There are cogent arguments then on both sides of the question, and there is very little positive proof on either: so we must be content to leave the matter in some doubt and obscurity. The first production to which our author attached the well-known signature of "Iz. Wa." was an Elegy on the Death of Dr. Donne, the Dean of St. Paul's, prefixed to a collection of Donne's Poems. Walton was then forty years of age. From this time forward we find him more or less engaged, at not very long intervals, on literary labours, till the very year of his death. The care which Walton spent on his productions seems to have been very great. He wrote and re-wrote, corrected, amended, rescinded, and added. This very poem—the Elegy on Donne—he completely remodelled in his old age, when he inserted it in the collection of his Lives. But we have thought it well to give the original version here as a literary curiosity, and the first work of his that has come down to us. The original Lives themselves—especially those of Wotton and Donne—were mere sketches of what they are in their present enlarged form. Walton had the good fortune to be thrown very early in life into the society and intimacy of men who were his superiors in rank and education. But he had enough of culture, joined to his inherent reverence of mind, to appreciate and understand all that they had and he wanted. The preface to Sir John Skeffington's Heroe of Lorenzo had for two centuries lain forgotten, and escaped the notice of Walton's biographers, till in 1852 it was discovered by Dr. Bliss of Oxford, and communicated by him to the late William Pickering. The original Spanish work was first published in 1630. The author's real name was not Lorenzo, but Balthazar Gracian, a Jesuit of Aragon, who flourished during the first half of the seventeenth century, when the cultivated style took possession of Spanish prose, and rose to its greatest consideration.[5] It is a collection of short, wise apothegms and maxims for the conduct of life, sometimes illustrated by stories of valour, or prowess, or magnanimity, of the old Castilian heroes who figure in "Count Lucanor." The book, though now no longer read, must have been very popular at one time, for there exist two or three later English versions of it, without, however, the nervous concentration of style and idiomatic diction that characterize the translation sent forth to the world under Walton's auspices. The two Letters published in 1680 under the title of Love and Truth,[6] were written respectively in the years 1668 and 1679. The evidence of their authorship is twofold, and we think quite conclusive. In one of the very few copies known to exist, and now in the library of Emanuel College, Cambridge, its original possessor, Archbishop Sancroft, has written:—"Is. Walton's 2 letters conc. ye Distemp's of ye Times, 1680," and Dr. Zouch appended to his reprint of the tract[7] a number of parallel passages from other acknowledged writings of Walton, of themselves almost sufficient to fix the question on internal evidence alone. In the British Museum copy of this tract is the following note on one of the fly-leaves in the autograph of the late William Pickering:— "The present is the only copy I have met with after twenty years' The copy described above [i.e., the Emanuel College copy] appears to be the same edition as the present [that now in the British Museum], but has the following variation. After the title-page is printed The Author to the Stationer "Mr. Brome," &c., and the Epistle ends with "Your friend," without the N.N. which is found in this copy. But what is more remarkable, the printed word Author is run through, and corrected with a pen, and over it written Publisher, which is evidently in the handwriting of Walton. So Mr. Pickering further certifies. The following allusion towards the bottom of p. 37 confirms the idea of Walton's authorship. Speaking of Hugh Peters and John Lilbourn, the writer says:—"Their turbulent lives and uncomfortable deaths are not I hope yet worn out of the memory of many. He that compares them with the holy life and happy death of Mr. George Herbert, as it is plainly and I hope truly writ by Mr. Isaac Walton, may in it find a perfect pattern for an humble and devout Christian to imitate," &c. The following are the chief parallel passages in this pamphlet and in Second Letter, p. 19. Life of George Herbert. I wish as heartily as you Mr. George Herbert having do that all such Clergy-mens changed his sword and Wives as have silk Cloaths silk clothes into a canonical be-daubed with Lace, and coat, thus warned Mrs. Herbert their heads hanged about against this egregious folly with painted Ribands, were of striving for precedency:— enjoyned Penance for their "You are now a minister's pride: And their Husbands wife, and must now so far forget punisht for being so tame, or your father's house, as not so lovingly-simple, as to suffer to claim a precedence of any them; for, by such Cloaths, of your parishioners," &c. they proclaim their own Ambition, and their Husbands folly. And I say the like, concerning their striving for Precedency. P. 20. Life of George Herbert. And, I confess also, what One cure for the wickedness you say of a Clergy-mans of the times would be, bidding to fast on the Eves of for the clergy themselves Holy-days, in Lent, and the to keep the Ember-weeks Ember Weeks: And I wish strictly, &c. those biddings were forborn, or better practised by themselves. P. 20. Life of George Herbert. And, I wish as heartily as Those ministers that huddled you can, that they would not up the church prayers only read, but pray, the without a visible reverence Common Prayer; and not and affection: namely, such huddle it up so fast (as too as semed to say the Lord's many do) by getting into a Prayer or collect in a breath. middle of a second Collect, before a devout Hearer can say Amen to the first. _Preface to Sanderson's XXI P. 20. Sermons, 1655._ And now, having unbowelled But since I had thus adventured my very soul thus to unbowel myself, freely to you, &c. and to lay open the very inmost thoughts of my heart. P.21. Life of Sanderton. A Corrosive, or (as Solomon Riches so gotten, and added says of ill-gotten riches) to his great estate, would like gravel in his teeth. prove like gravel in his teeth. P. 21. Life of Sir H. Wotton. Those Bishops and Martyrs It was the advice of Sir that assisted in this Reformation, Henry Wotton, "Take heed did not (as Sir Henry Wotton of thinking the farther you go said wisely) think the farther from the Church of Rome, they went from the Church of Rome, the nearer you are to God." the nearer they got to heaven. P. 23. Life of Richard Hooker. To make the Women, the Here the very women and Shop-keepers, and the middle- shopkeepers were able to judge witted People … less of predestination, and determine busie, and more humble and what laws were fit to lowly in their own eyes, and be obeyed or abolished. to think that they are neither called, nor are fit to meddle with, and judge of the most hidden and mysterious points in Divinity, and Government of the Church and State. P. 36. Life of Sanderson. I desire you to look back Some years before the unhappy with me to the beginning of Long Parliament, this the late Long Parliament nation being then happy and 1640, at which time we in peace. were the quietest and happiest people in the Christian World. To the present Editor the collection and annotation of these Remains has been a most welcome labour of love. Some of his oldest and most cherished memories connect themselves with the author of the "Complete Angler." That book was one of the first that he ever read with real and genuine delight; and even before reading days commenced, in the earliest dawn of memory, the place where Walton had cut his familiar signature of "Iz. Wa." on Chaucer's tomb in Westminster Abbey, was pointed out to him often by a kindred spirit now here no more. The name of Walton will also be found enshrined in the earliest prose production[8] to which the Editor prefixed his own name. R.H.S. FOOTNOTES[1] "Happy old man, whose worth all mankind knows June 5, 1683. [2] The Love of Amos and Laura. Written by S.P. London. Printed for Richard Hawkins, dwelling in Chancery-Lane, neere Serieants Inne, 1619. Printed at the end of a volume entitled, Alcilia, Philoparthens louing Folly, &c., which, from its being signed at the end with the initials "J.C.," has been attributed to Walton's friend, John Chalkhill, whose posthumous poem, Thealma and Clearchus, he published in the last year of his life. The lines to Walton do not appear in the earlier quarto edition of the book issued by the same publisher in 1613, or in the later quarto of 1628. [3] Thealma and Clearchus; a Pastoral Romance, by John Chalkhill. [4] Vol. iv. (1821), pp. 230-249. [5] Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature (Lond. 1849), vol. iii. p. 177. [6] Love and Truth: / in / Two modest and peaceable / Letters / concerning / The distempers of the present Times. / Written / From a quiet and Conformable Citizen of / LONDON, to two busie and Factious/ Shop-keepers in Coventry/ 1 Pet. 4. 15. LONDON, / Printed by M.C. for Henry Brome at the Gun / COLLATION: 4to. pp. iv. (with Title) 40 (Sig. A 1 and 2; [7] York, 1795, pp. x. 70. [8] The School of Pantagruel, Sunbury, 1862, p. 9. * * * * * |
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