Introduction to the Compleat Angler | Page 5

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 man of eighty, in 1679. Two of his songs are in
The Compleat Angler. Probably the attribution is right: Chalkhill's tomb
commemorates a man after Walton's own heart, but some have
assigned the volume to Walton himself. Chalkhill is described, on the
title-page, as 'an acquaintant and friend of Edmund Spencer,' which is
impossible. {4}
On August 9, 1683, Walton wrote his will, 'in the neintyeth year of my
age, and in perfect memory, for which praised be God.' He professes
the Anglican faith, despite 'a very long and very trew friendship for
some of the Roman Church.' His worldly estate he has acquired 'neither
by falsehood or flattery or the extreme crewelty of the law of this
nation.' His property was in two houses in London, the lease of
Norington farm, a farm near Stafford, besides books, linen, and a
hanging cabinet inscribed with his name, now, it seems, in the
possession of Mr. Elkin Mathews. A bequest is made of money for
coals to the poor of Stafford, 'every last weike in Janewary, or in every
first weike in Febrewary; I say then, because I take that time to be the
hardest and most pinching times with pore people.' To the Bishop of
Winchester he bequeathed a ring with the posy,