Introduction to the Compleat Angler | Page 4

Angler. Five editions in twelve years is not bad
evidence of Walton's popularity. But times now altered. Walton is
really an Elizabethan: he has the quaint freshness, the apparently artless
music of language of the great age. He is a friend of 'country contents':
no lover of the town, no keen student of urban ways and mundane men.
A new taste, modelled on that of the wits of Louis XIV., had come in:
we are in the period of Dryden, and approaching that of Pope.
There was no new edition of Walton till Moses Browne (by Johnson's
desire) published him, with 'improvements,' in 1750. Then came
Hawkins's edition in 1760. Johnson said of Hawkins, 'Why, ma'am, I
believe him to be an honest man at the bottom; but, to be sure, he is
penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of
brutality, and a tendency to savageness, that cannot easily be defended.'
This was hardly the editor for Izaak! However, Hawkins, probably by
aid of Oldys the antiquary (as Mr. Marston shows), laid a good
foundation for a biography of Walton. Errors he made, but Sir Harris
Nicolas has corrected them. Johnson himself reckoned Walton's Lives
as 'one of his most favourite books.' He preferred the life of Donne, and
justly complained that Walton's story of Donne's vision of his absent
wife had been left out of a modern edition. He explained Walton's
friendship with persons of higher rank by his being 'a great panegyrist.'
The eighteenth century, we see, came back to Walton, as the nineteenth
has done. He was precisely the author to suit Charles Lamb. He was
reprinted again and again, and illustrated by Stoddart and others.
Among his best editors are Major (1839), 'Ephemera' (1853), Nicolas
(1836, 1860), and Mr. Marston (1888).
The only contemporary criticism known to me is that of Richard
Franck, who had served with Cromwell in Scotland, and, not liking the
aspect of changing times, returned to the north, and fished from the Esk
to Strathnaver. In 1658 he wrote his Northern Memoirs, an itinerary of
sport, heavily cumbered by dull reflections and pedantic style. Franck,

however, was a practical angler, especially for salmon, a fish of which
Walton knew nothing: he also appreciated the character of the great
Montrose. He went to America, wrote a wild cosmogonic work, and
The Admirable and Indefatigable Adventures of the Nine Pious
Pilgrims (one pilgrim catches a trout!) (London, 1708). The Northern
Memoirs of 1658 were not published till 1694. Sir Walter Scott edited a
new issue, in 1821, and defended Izaak from the strictures of the
salmon-fisher. Izaak, says Franck, 'lays the stress of his arguments
upon other men's observations, wherewith he stuffs his indigested
octavo; so brings himself under the angler's censure and the common
calamity of a plagiary, to be pitied (poor man) for his loss of time, in
scribbling and transcribing other men's notions. . . . I remember in
Stafford, I urged his own argument upon him, that pickerel weed of
itself breeds pickerel (pike).' Franck proposed a rational theory, 'which
my Compleat Angler no sooner deliberated, but dropped his argument,
and leaves Gesner to defend it, so huffed away. . . . ' 'So note, the true
character of an industrious angler more deservedly falls upon Merrill
and Faulkner, or rather Izaak Ouldham, a man that fished salmon with
but three hairs at hook, whose collections and experiments were lost
with himself,'--a matter much to be regretted. It will be 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