Introduction to The Compleat Angler | Page 4

two doors west of Chancery Lane: the other occupant was a hosier. Mr. Nicholl has discovered that Walton was made free of the Ironmongers' Company on Nov. 12, 1618. He is styled an Ironmonger in his marriage licence. The facts are given in Mr. Marston's Life of Walton, prefixed to his edition of The Compleat Angler (1888). It is odd that a prentice ironmonger should have been a poet and a critic of poetry. Dr. Donne, before 1614, was Vicar of St. Dunstan's in the West, and in Walton had a parishioner, a disciple, and a friend. Izaak greatly loved the society of the clergy: he connected himself with Episcopal families, and had a natural taste for a Bishop. Through Donne, perhaps, or it may be in converse across the counter, he made acquaintance with Hales of Eton, Dr. King, and Sir Henry Wotton, himself an angler, and one who, like Donne and Izaak, loved a ghost story, and had several in his family. Drayton, the river-poet, author of the Polyolbion, is also spoken of by Walton as 'my old deceased friend.'
On Dec. 27, 1626, Walton married, at Canterbury, Rachel Floud, a niece, on the maternal side, by several descents, of Cranmer, the famous Archbishop of Canterbury. The Cranmers were intimate with the family of the judicious Hooker, and Walton was again connected with kinsfolk of that celebrated divine. Donne died in 1631, leaving to Walton, and to other friends, a bloodstone engraved with Christ crucified on an anchor: the seal is impressed on Walton's will. When Donne's poems were published in 1633, Walton added commendatory verses:-
'As all lament (Or should) this general cause of discontent.'
The parenthetic 'or should' is much in Walton's manner. 'Witness my mild pen, not used to upbraid the world,' is also a pleasant and accurate piece of self-criticism. 'I am his convert,' Walton exclaims. In a citation from a manuscript which cannot be found, and perhaps never existed, Walton is spoken of as 'a very sweet poet in his youth, and more than all in matters of love.' {1} Donne had been in the same case: he, or Time, may have converted Walton from amorous ditties. Walton, in an edition of Donne's poems of 1635, writes of
'This book (dry emblem) which begins With love; but ends with tears and sighs for sins.'
The preacher and his convert had probably a similar history of the heart: as we shall see, Walton, like the Cyclops, had known love. Early in 1639, Wotton wrote to Walton about a proposed Life of Donne, to be written by himself, and hoped 'to enjoy your own ever welcome company in the approaching time of the Fly and the Cork.' Wotton was a fly-fisher; the cork, or float, or 'trembling quill,' marks Izaak for the bottom-fisher he was. Wotton died in December 1639; Walton prefixed his own Life of Donne to that divine's sermons in 1640. He says, in the Dedication of the reprint of 1658, that 'it had the approbation of our late learned and eloquent King,' the martyred Charles I. Living in, or at the corner of Chancery Lane, Walton is known to have held parochial office: he was even elected 'scavenger.' He had the misfortune to lose seven children--of whom the last died in 1641--his wife, and his mother-in-law. In 1644 he left Chancery Lane, and probably retired from trade. He was, of course, a Royalist. Speaking of the entry of the Scots, who came, as one of them said, 'for the goods,--and chattels of the English,' he remarks, 'I saw and suffered by it.' {2} He also mentions that he 'saw' shops shut by their owners till Laud should be put to death, in January 1645. In his Life of Sanderson, Walton vouches for an anecdote of 'the knowing and conscientious King,' Charles, who, he says, meant to do public penance for Strafford's death, and for the abolishing of Episcopacy in Scotland. But the condition, 'peaceable possession of the Crown,' was not granted to Charles, nor could have been granted to a prince who wished to reintroduce Bishops in Scotland. Walton had his information from Dr. Morley. On Nov. 25, 1645, Walton probably wrote, though John Marriott signed, an Address to the Reader, printed, in 1646, with Quarles's Shepherd's Eclogues. The piece is a little idyll in prose, and 'angle, lines, and flies' are not omitted in the description of 'the fruitful month of May,' while Pan is implored to restore Arcadian peace to Britannia, 'and grant that each honest shepherd may again sit under his own vine and fig-tree, and feed his own flock,' when the King comes, no doubt. 'About' 1646 Walton married Anne, half-sister of Bishop Ken, a lady 'of much Christian meeknesse.' Sir Harris Nicolas thinks that he only visited Stafford occasionally, in these troubled