Introduction to the Compleat Angler | Page 7

had thought much on the subject,
and, as Boswell notes, 'varied from himself in talk,' when he discussed
the measure of truth permitted to biographers. 'If a man is to write a
Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write
a Life, he must represent it as it really was.' Peculiarities were not to be
concealed, he said, and his own were not veiled by Boswell. 'Nobody
can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived
in social intercourse with him.' 'They only who live with a man can
write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination; and few
people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him.'
Walton had lived much in the society of his subjects, Donne and
Wotton; with Sanderson he had a slighter acquaintance; George Herbert
he had only met; Hooker, of course, he had never seen in the flesh. It is
obvious to every reader that his biographies of Donne and Wotton are
his best. In Donne's Life he feels that he is writing of an English St.
Austin,--'for I think none was so like him before his conversion; none
so like St. Ambrose after it: and if his youth had the infirmities of the
one, his age had the excellencies of the other; the learning and holiness
of both.'
St. Augustine made free confession of his own infirmities of youth.
With great delicacy Walton lets Donne also confess himself, printing a
letter in which he declines to take Holy Orders, because his course of
life when very young had been too notorious. Delicacy and tact are as
notable in Walton's account of Donne's poverty, melancholy, and
conversion through the blessed means of gentle King Jamie. Walton
had an awful loyalty, a sincere reverence for the office of a king. But
wherever he introduces King James, either in his Donne or his Wotton,
you see a subdued version of the King James of The Fortunes of Nigel.
The pedantry, the good nature, the touchiness, the humour, the
nervousness, are all here. It only needs a touch of the king's broad
accent to set before us, as vividly as in Scott, the interviews with
Donne, and that singular scene when Wotton, disguised as Octavio
Baldi, deposits his long rapier at the door of his majesty's chamber.
Wotton, in Florence, was warned of a plot to murder James VI. The

duke gave him 'such Italian antidotes against poison as the Scots till
then had been strangers to': indeed, there is no antidote for a dirk, and
the Scots were not poisoners. Introduced by Lindsay as 'Octavio Baldi,'
Wotton found his nervous majesty accompanied by four Scottish
nobles. He spoke in Italian; then, drawing near, hastily whispered that
he was an Englishman, and prayed for a private interview. This, by
some art, he obtained, delivered his antidotes, and, when James
succeeded Elizabeth, rose to high favour. Izaak's suppressed humour
makes it plain that Wotton had acted the scene for him, from the
moment of leaving the long rapier at the door. Again, telling how
Wotton, in his peaceful hours as Provost of Eton, intended to write a
Life of Luther, he says that King Charles diverted him from his purpose
to attempting a History of England 'by a persuasive loving violence (to
which may be added a promise of 500 pounds a year).' He likes these
parenthetic touches, as in his description of Donne, 'always preaching
to himself, like an angel from a cloud,--but in none.' Again, of a
commendation of one of his heroes he says, 'it is a known
truth,--though it be in verse.'
A memory of the days when Izaak was an amorist, and shone in love
ditties, appears thus. He is speaking of Donne:--
'Love is a flattering mischief . . . a passion that carries us to commit
errors with as much ease as whirlwinds remove feathers.'
'The tears of lovers, or beauty dressed in sadness, are observed to have
in them a charming sadness, and to become very often too strong to be
resisted.'
These are examples of Walton's sympathy: his power of
portrait-drawing is especially attested by his study of Donne, as the
young gallant and poet, the unhappy lover, the man of state out of place
and neglected; the heavily burdened father, the conscientious scholar,
the charming yet ascetic preacher and divine, the saint who, dying,
makes himself in his own shroud, an emblem of mortality.
As an example of Walton's style, take the famous vision of Dr. Donne
in Paris. He had left his wife expecting her confinement:--

'Two days after their arrival there, Mr. Donne was left alone in that
room in which Sir Robert and he, and some other friends, had