Father Isaak,--When I would be quiet and go angling it is my custom
to carry in my wallet thy pretty book, 'The Compleat Angler.' Here,
methinks, if I find not trout I shall find content, and good company,
and sweet songs, fair milkmaids, and country mirth. For you are to know
that trout be now scarce, and whereas he was ever a fearful fish, he
hath of late become so wary that none but the cunningest anglers may be
even with him.
It is not as it was in your time, Father, when a man might leave his
shop in Fleet Street, of a holiday, and, when he had stretched his legs
up Tottenham Hill, come lightly to meadows chequered with waterlilies
and lady-smocks, and so fall to his sport. Nay, now have the houses
so much increased, like a spreading sore (through the breaking of that
excellent law of the Conscientious King and blessed Martyr, whereby
building beyond the walls was forbidden), that the meadows are all
swallowed up in streets. And as to the River Lea, wherein you took many
a good trout, I read in the news sheets that 'its bed is many inches
thick in horrible filth, and the air for more than half a mile on each
side of it is polluted with a horrible, sickening stench,' so that we
stand in dread of a new Plague, called the Cholera. And so it is all
about London for many miles, and if a man, at heavy charges, betake
himself to the fields, lo you, folk are grown so greedy that none will
suffer a stranger to fish in his water.
So poor anglers are in sore straits. Unless a man be rich and can
pay great rents, he may not fish, in England, and hence spring the
discontents of the times, for the angler is full of content, if he
do but take trout, but if he be driven from the waterside, he falls,
perchance, into evil company, and cries out to divide the property of
the gentle folk. As many now do, even among Parliament, men, whom you
loved not, Father Isaak, neither do I love them more than Reason and
Scripture bid each of us be kindly to his neighbour. But, behold, the
causes of the ill content are not yet all expressed, for even where a
man hath licence to fish, he will hardly take trout in our age, unless
he be all the more cunning. For the fish, harried this way and that by
so many of your disciples, is exceeding shy and artful, nor will he bite
at a fly unless it falleth lightly, just above his mouth, and floateth
dry over him, for all the world like the natural _ephemeris_. And we may
no longer angle with worm for him, nor with penk or minnow, nor with the
natural fly, as was your manner, but only with the artificial, for the
more difficulty the more diversion. For my part I may cry, like Viator
in your book, 'Master, I can neither catch with the first nor second
Angle: I have no fortune.'
So we fare in England, but somewhat better north of the Tweed, where
trout are less wary, but for the most part small, except in the extreme
rough north, among horrid hills and lakes. Thither, Master, as
methinks you may remember, went Richard Franck, that called himself
_Philanthropus_, and was, as it were, the Columbus of anglers,
discovering for them a new Hyperborean world. But Franck, doubtless, is
now an angler in the Lake of Darkness, with Nero and other tyrants, for
he followed after Cromwell, the man of blood, in the old riding days.
How wickedly doth Franck boast of that leader of the giddy multitude,
'when they raged, and became restless to find out misery for themselves
and others, and the rabble would herd themselves together,' as you said,
'and endeavour to govern and act in spite of authority.' So you wrote;
and what said Franck, that recreant angler? Doth he not praise
'Ireton, Vane, Nevill, and Martin, and the most renowned, valorous, and
victorious conqueror, Oliver Cromwell.' Natheless, with all his sins
on his head, this Franck discovered Scotland for anglers, and my heart
turns to him when he praises 'the glittering and resolute streams of
Tweed.'
In those wilds of Assynt and Loch Rannoch, Father, we, thy followers,
may yet take trout, and forget the evils of the times. But, to be done
with Franck, how harshly he speaks of thee and thy book. 'For you may
dedicate your opinion to what scribbling putationer you please; the
_Compleat Angler_ if you will, who tells you of a tedious fly story,
extravagantly collected from antiquated authors, such as Gesner and
Dubravius.' Again, he speaks of 'Isaac Walton, whose authority to
me seems alike authentick, as is the general opinion of the vulgar
prophet,' &c.
Certain I am that Franck, if a better angler than thou, was a worse
man, who, writing his 'Dialogues Piscatorial' or 'Northern Memoirs' five
years after the world welcomed thy 'Compleat Angler,' was jealous of
thy favour with the people, and, may be, hated thee for thy loyalty and
sound faith. But, Master, like a peaceful man avoiding contention, thou
didst never answer this blustering Franck, but wentest quietly about thy
quiet Lea, and left him his roaring Brora and windy Assynt. How could
this noisy man know thee--and know thee he did, having argued with thee
in Stafford--and not love Isaak Walton? A pedant angler, I call him,
a plaguy angler, so let him huff away, and turn we to thee and to thy
sweet charm in fishing for men.
How often, studying in thy book, have I hummed to myself that of
Horace--
Laudis amore tumes? Sunt certa piacula quae te
Ter pure lecto poterunt recreare libello.
So healing a book for the frenzy of fame is thy discourse on meadows,
and pure streams, and the country life. How peaceful, men say, and
blessed must have been the life of this old man, how lapped in content,
and hedged about by his own humility from the world! They forget, who
speak thus, that thy years, which were many, were also evil, or would
have seemed evil to divers that had tasted of thy fortunes. Thou wert
poor, but that, to thee, was no sorrow, for greed of money was thy
detestation. Thou wert of lowly rank, in an age when gentle blood was
alone held in regard; yet tiny virtues made thee hosts of friends, and
chiefly among religious men, bishops, and doctors of the Church. Thy
private life was not unacquainted with sorrow; thy first wife and all
her fair children were taken from thee like flowers in spring, though,
in thine age, new love and new offspring comforted thee like 'the
primrose of the later year.' Thy private griefs might have made thee
bitter, or melancholy, so might the sorrows of the State and of the
Church, which were deprived of their heads by cruel men, despoiled
of their wealth, the pious driven, like thee, from their homes; fear
everywhere, everywhere robbery and confusion: all this ruin might have
angered another temper. But thou, Father, didst bear all with so much
sweetness as perhaps neither natural temperament, nor a firm faith, nor
the love of angling could alone have displayed. For we see many anglers
(as witness Richard Franck aforesaid) who are angry men, and myself,
when I get my hooks entangled at every cast in a tree, have come nigh to
swear prophane.
Also we see religious men that are sour and fanatical, no rare thing
in the party that professes godliness. But neither private sorrow nor
public grief could abate thy natural kindliness, nor shake a religion
which was not untried, but had, indeed, passed through the furnace like
fine gold. For if we find not Faith at all times easy, because of the
oppositions of Science, and the searching curiosity of men's minds,
neither was Faith a matter of course in thy day. For the learned and
pious were greatly tossed about, like worthy Mr. Chillingworth, by
doubts wavering between the Church of Rome and the Reformed Church of
England. The humbler folk, also, were invited, now here, now there, by
the clamours of fanatical Nonconformists, who gave themselves out to be
somebody, while Atheism itself was not without many to witness to it.
Therefore, such a religion as thine was not, so to say, a mere innocence
of evil in the things of our Belief, but a reasonable and grounded
faith, strong in despite of oppositions. Happy was the man in whom
temper, and religion, and the love of the sweet country and an angler's
pastime so conveniently combined; happy the long life which held in its
hand that threefold clue through the labyrinth of human fortunes! Around
thee Church and State might fall in ruins, and might be rebuilded, and
thy tears would not be bitter, nor thy triumph cruel.
Thus, by God's blessing, it befell thee
Nec turpem senectam
Degere, nec cithara carentem.
I would, Father, that I could get at the verity about thy poems. Those
recommendatory verses with which thou didst grace the Lives of Dr. Donne
and others of thy friends, redound more to the praise of thy kind heart
than thy fancy. But what or whose was the pastoral poem of 'Thealma and
Clearchus,' which thou didst set about printing in 1678, and gavest to
the world in 1683? Thou gavest John Chalkhill for the author's name, and
a John Chalkhill of thy kindred died at Winchester, being eighty years
of his age, in 1679. Now thou speakest of John Chalkhill as 'a friend of
Edmund Spenser's,' and how could this be?
Are they right who hold that John Chalkhill was but a name of a friend,
borrowed by thee out of modesty, and used as a cloak to cover poetry of
thine own inditing? When Mr. Flatman writes of Chalkhill, 't is in words
well fitted to thine own merit:
Happy old man, whose worth all mankind knows
Except himself, who charitably shows
The ready road to virtue and to praise,
The road to many long and happy days.
However it be, in that road, by quiet streams and through green
pastures, thou didst walk all thine almost century of years, and we,
who stray into thy path out of the highway of life, we seem to hold thy
hand, and listen to thy cheerful voice. If our sport be worse, may our
content be equal, and our praise, therefore, none the less. Father, if
Master Stoddard, the great fisher of Tweed-side, be with thee, greet
him for me, and thank him for those songs of his, and perchance he will
troll thee a catch of our dear River.
Tweed! winding and wild! where the heart is unbound,
They know not, they dream not, who linger around,
How the saddened will smile, and the wasted rewin
From thee--the bliss withered within.
Or perhaps thou wilt better love,
The lanesome Tala and the Lyne,
And Mahon wi' its mountain rills,
An' Etterick, whose waters twine
Wi' Yarrow frae the forest hills;
An' Gala, too, and Teviot bright,
An' mony a stream o' playfu' speed,
Their kindred valleys a' unite
Amang the braes o' bonnie Tweed!
So, Master, may you sing against each other, you two good old anglers,
like Peter and Corydon, that sang in your golden age.