Waltoniana | Page 2

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 and 1679. The evidence of their authorship is twofold, and we think quite conclusive. In one of the very few copies known to exist, and now in the library of Emanuel College, Cambridge, its original possessor, Archbishop Sancroft, has written:--"Is.