Waltoniana | Page 2

beloved friend, I too unworthy of so
great a blisse: These harsh-tun'd lines I here to thee commend, Thou
being cause it is now as it is: For hadst thou held thy tongue, by silence
might These have beene buried in obliuious night.
"If they were pleasing, I would call them thine, And disauow my title to
the verse: But being bad, I needes must call them mine. No ill thing can
be cloathed in thy verse. Accept them then, and where I have offended,
Rase thou it out, and let it be amended.
"S.P." [2]
What poems Walton wrote in his youth, we have now no means of
knowing; it has not been discovered that any have been printed, unless
we adopt the theory advocated by Mr. Singer,[3] and by a writer in the
"Retrospective Review,"[4] that the poem of _Thealma and Clearchus_,
which he published in the last year of his life, as a posthumous
fragment of his relation John Chalkhill, was really a juvenile work of
his own. Some plausibility is lent to this notion by the fact that Walton
speaks of the author with so much reticence and reserve in his preface
to the volume, and also that in introducing two of Chalkhill's songs into
the "Complete Angler," he does not bestow on them the customary
words of commendation. This theory has been rebutted by others, who
assert that Walton was of too truthful and guileless a nature to resort to
such an artifice. We confess that we are unable to see anything
dishonest in the adoption, as a pseudonym, of the name of a deceased
friend, or anything more than Walton appears to have done on another
occasion when he published his two letters on "Love and Truth." It is
certain, however, that a family of Chalkhills existed, with whom
Walton was closely connected by his marriage with the sister of Bishop
Ken. But that an "acquaintant and friend of Edmund Spenser," capable
of writing such a poem as _Thealma and Clearchus_, should have kept
his talents so concealed, that in an age of commendatory verses no
slightest contemporary record of him exists--is, to say the least,
extraordinary. There are cogent arguments then on both sides of the
question, and there is very little positive proof on either: so we must be
content to leave the matter in some doubt and obscurity.

The first production to which our author attached the well-known
signature of "Iz. Wa." was an Elegy on the Death of Dr. Donne, the
Dean of St. Paul's, prefixed to a collection of Donne's Poems. Walton
was then forty years of age. From this time forward we find him more
or less engaged, at not very long intervals, on literary labours, till the
very year of his death.
The care which Walton spent on his productions seems to have been
very great. He wrote and re-wrote, corrected, amended, rescinded, and
added. This very poem--the Elegy on Donne--he completely
remodelled in his old age, when he inserted it in the collection of his
Lives. But we have thought it well to give the original version here as a
literary curiosity, and the first work of his that has come down to us.
The original Lives themselves--especially those of Wotton and
Donne--were mere sketches of what they are in their present enlarged
form.
Walton had the good fortune to be thrown very early in life into the
society and intimacy of men who were his superiors in rank and
education. But he had enough of culture, joined to his inherent
reverence of mind, to appreciate and understand all that they had and he
wanted.
The preface to Sir John Skeffington's Heroe of Lorenzo had for two
centuries lain forgotten, and escaped the notice of Walton's biographers,
till in 1852 it was discovered by Dr. Bliss of Oxford, and
communicated by him to the late William Pickering.
The original Spanish work was first published in 1630. The author's
real name was not Lorenzo, but Balthazar Gracian, a Jesuit of Aragon,
who flourished during the first half of the seventeenth century, when
the cultivated style took possession of Spanish prose, and rose to its
greatest consideration.[5] It is a collection of short, wise apothegms and
maxims for the conduct of life, sometimes illustrated by stories of
valour, or prowess, or magnanimity, of the old Castilian heroes who
figure in "Count Lucanor." The book, though now no longer read, must
have been very popular at one time, for there exist two or three later
English versions of it, without, however, the nervous concentration of
style and idiomatic diction that characterize the translation sent forth to
the world under Walton's auspices.
The two Letters published in 1680 under the title of Love and Truth,[6]

were written respectively in the years 1668