Introduction to The Compleat Angler | Page 7

observed, of
course, that hair was then used, and gut is first mentioned for angling
purposes by Mr. Pepys. Indeed, the flies which Scott was hunting for
when he found the lost Ms. of the first part of Waverley are tied on
horse-hairs. They are in the possession of the descendants of Scott's
friend, Mr. William Laidlaw. The curious angler, consulting Franck,
will find that his salmon flies are much like our own, but less
variegated. Scott justly remarks that, while Walton was habit and
repute a bait-fisher, even Cotton knows nothing of salmon. Scott
wished that Walton had made the northern tour, but Izaak would have
been sadly to seek, running after a fish down a gorge of the Shin or the
Brora, and the discomforts of the north would have finished his career.
In Scotland he would not have found fresh sheets smelling of lavender.
Walton was in London 'in the dangerous year 1655.' He speaks of his
meeting Bishop Sanderson there, 'in sad-coloured clothes, and, God
knows, far from being costly.' The friends were driven by wind and rain
into 'a cleanly house, where we had bread, cheese, ale, and a fire, for
our ready money. The rain and wind were so obliging to me, as to force
our stay there for at least an hour, to my great content and advantage;
for in that time he made to me many useful observations of the present
times with much clearness and conscientious freedom.' It was a year of
Republican and Royalist conspiracies: the clergy were persecuted and
banished from London.
No more is known of Walton till the happy year 1660, when the king
came to his own again, and Walton's Episcopal friends to their palaces.
Izaak produced an 'Eglog,' on May 29:-
'The king! The king's returned! And now Let's banish all sad thoughts,
and sing: We have our laws, and have our king.'
If Izaak was so eccentric as to go to bed sober on that glorious
twenty-ninth of May, I greatly misjudge him. But he grew elderly. In
1661 he chronicles the deaths of 'honest Nat. and R. Roe,--they are
gone, and with them most of my pleasant hours, even as a shadow that
passeth away, and returns not.' On April 17, 1662, Walton lost his
second wife: she died at Worcester, probably on a visit to Bishop
Morley. In the same year, the bishop was translated to Winchester,
where the palace became Izaak's home. The Itchen (where, no doubt, he

angled with worm) must have been his constant haunt. He was busy
with his Life of Richard Hooker (1665). The peroration, as it were, was
altered and expanded in 1670, and this is but one example of Walton's
care of his periods. One beautiful passage he is known to have rewritten
several times, till his ear was satisfied with its cadences. In 1670 he
published his Life of George Herbert. 'I wish, if God shall be so pleased,
that I may be so happy as to die like him.' In 1673, in a Dedication of
the third edition of Reliquiae Wottonianae, Walton alludes to his
friendship with a much younger and gayer man than himself, Charles
Cotton (born 1630), the friend of Colonel Richard Lovelace, and of Sir
John Suckling: the translator of Scarron's travesty of Virgil, and of
Montaigne's Essays. Cotton was a roisterer, a man at one time deep in
debt, but he was a Royalist, a scholar, and an angler. The friendship
between him and Walton is creditable to the freshness of the old man
and to the kindness of the younger, who, to be sure, laughed at Izaak's
heavily dubbed London flies. 'In him,' says Cotton, 'I have the
happiness to know the worthiest man, and to enjoy the best and the
truest friend any man ever had.' We are reminded of Johnson with
Langton and Topham Beauclerk. Meanwhile Izaak the younger had
grown up, was educated under Dr. Fell at Christ Church, and made the
Grand Tour in 1675, visiting Rome and Venice. In March 1676 he
proceeded M.A. and took Holy Orders. In this year Cotton wrote his
treatise on fly-fishing, to be published with Walton's new edition; and
the famous fishing house on the Dove, with the blended initials of the
two friends, was built. In 1678, Walton wrote his Life of Sanderson. . . .
''Tis now too late to wish that my life may be like his, for I am in the
eighty-fifth year of my age, but I humbly beseech Almighty God that
my death may be; and do as earnestly beg of every reader to say
Amen!' He wrote, in 1678, a preface to Thealma and Clearchus (1683).
The poem is attributed to John Chalkhill, a Fellow of Winchester
College, who died, a