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,
I too unworthy of so great a blisse:
These harsh-tun'd lines I here to thee commend,
Thou being cause it is now as it is:
For hadst thou held thy tongue, by silence might
These have beene buried in obliuious night.
"If they were pleasing, I would call them thine,
And disauow my title to the verse:
But being bad, I needes must call them mine.
No ill thing can be cloathed in thy verse.
Accept them then, and where I have offended,
Rase thou it out, and let it be amended.
"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'
search, excepting the one in Emanuel College, Cambridge. W. Pickering."
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