to note how vigorous and enthusiastic his faculties and powers remained even at that extraordinary age. There is a sense, indeed, in which this Life may be regarded as the most interesting of the series: inasmuch as, in it more fully than in any other of his published writings, Walton delivered himself of his views concerning the grave political and social crisis which shook the Constitution to its foundations during the intestine quarrels of the reign of Charles the First. And a very curious picture it is which Walton effects for us. It reminds me of some old Byzantine painting in which you recognise, amid all the grotesqueness of its drawing, all the absurdities of its perspective, some dim and assured truth from the artist's point of view. The details of Walton's narrative, the motives he assigns to his royal hero—'the good King'— and his conception of the true grievances of the Populace against the Monarchy, are absurd, even to the verge of childishness. Yet it is certain that to Walton, as to many another simple-minded man of his time-possibly to Dr. Sanderson himself—the whole agitation appeared in the light of a fanatical effort on the part of evil-minded Covenanters to impose on a nation by force that which they found so easy to believe for their own part. The King himself, it is like enough, was insincere too not to use every means in his power that this point of view should be widely spread among such as had no civil conception of a political grievance. He was, moreover, in his own way, a man of convinced religious ideas. Ceremonial was pleasant to him; the elegance of ritual and the ordered solemnity of the Rubric touched his imagination. Casuistry, too, was a science in which he took a royally artistic interest; so that, while languishing in prison, he even—with assistance-undertook the translation into exact English' of Sanderson's treatise De Juramento: a subject curiously inappropriate for the choice of such a prince in such a crisis. With

these tastes and these sympathies, therefore, the King, one must reasonably conclude, did manage to create a kind of ecclesiastical tradition: that it was his to defend even unto the peril and the act of death the cause of the Episcopal Church of England. And so, indeed, it was; but not essentially, not solely. One can imagine a Great Rebellion, different of course in the religious character of the rebels, without any necessity for an episcopal cause at all; and indeed, so far as that goes, the King did abolish episcopacy in Scotland; yet he sanctioned the execution of Strafford. With all this, however, because the officially religious sentiments of Charles were with episcopacy: because the Cavalier cause was partly identified with the cause of the English Church; and because then, as in our own day, men will sympathise with every detail of a great movement for the reason that their own little interests are included as one detail in such a movement: therefore it was that the King appeared to the simple and single-minded Churchmen of his own time as a Prophet raising the banner of the Lord's defence and as a Martyr dying in the Lord's cause. That this was certainly so Walton's life of Sanderson would prove: even if, finding the necessity of reconciling all the wandering incidents of this difficult period, one did not from other sources recognise that this alone is the explanation of the more than fanatical enthusiasm with which Churchmen were filled for the person of Charles; a fanaticism which added to the liturgy of the Church the Form of Humiliation for the murder of King Charles the Martyr, with other preposterous and wanton services. For my own part, indeed, I hold the execution of the King in complete abhorrence; but that sentiment does not blind me to the absurdity of ranking the unhappy culmination of a vehement political contest with the persecutions of Diocletian or the Acts of the Spanish Inquisition. Charles was, if you please, a political martyr; but that is not title enough to range him with

Polycarp and Felicitas. They died for the Church: he died for his Monarchy, in which the Church was accidentally included.

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This explanation may serve to mitigate the sense of painful amusement with which one is inclined to read the opinions set forth by Walton with fervour and enthusiasm in his Sanderson. But to turn from his political point of view to his literary achievement, I think it would not be easy, without previous knowledge, to convict him of any of the failings of old age in this, the latest of his lives. With that knowledge, indeed, one may notice a certain increase in his naïveté. That quality, although it distinguishes all his work, is never marked so emphatically as in his recital of Sanderson's death-bed. 'He was content,' Walton writes, 'or forced, to keep his bed in which I desire he may rest, till I have given some account of his behaviour there, and immediately before it :' a sentence brimming over with just such simple innocence as I should have expected to find in the old age of such a man as Izaak Walton. Apart from this quality, I have vainly endeavoured, even with the prejudices of knowledge, to discover any other traces of senility in the Sanderson. Nay, the life itself is only another demonstration of what I would call Walton's dramatic sensitiveness. Everybody knows how quickly a fine young mind, sensitive to literature, is unconsciously affected by any great style which crosses its path. Walton's sensitiveness was rather aroused by character. Character affected his literary manner. As we have seen, when he chose to write of Hooker, the stately, academic divine, his manner took upon it quite a natural stateliness and dignity; his life of Wotton, who was a personal friend, is rather a good man's chapter of gossip; while his Sanderson is moist with such humility and meekness as distinguished this genuinely meek Bishop. To read that Life is, without any stretch of fancy, to see, as it were rising from Walton's pages, this pale-faced, shy, morbidly sensitive man, with his 'matchless

memory' and his resource of large and curious learning. This is to say, in a sense, that Walton has produced a masterpiece of its kind; for there is no more difficult task in all letters than to convey a physical impression, a substantial picture, by a mere assemblage of personal details. Walton has assuredly done this in the instance before us, and his success, though I recognise the finer style, the completer regularity of his Hooker and his Herbert, inspires me with a more intimate affection for his Sanderson. 'Thus,' he pathetically and solemnly concludes, 'this pattern of meekness and primitive innocence changed for a better life. '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; and do as earnestly beg of every reader to say-Amen.' And though two centuries have passed since that inevitable death touched the old man's spirit, it is impossible to close the page upon which he makes his entreaty without fulfilling the prayer which he beseeches his readers to utter-a futile Amen.

To estimate Walton's character, it would be as useless as it is in the case of most men necessary to relate him to the period with which he was contemporary. He lived, indeed, through the most exciting and mutable epoch of English history, and he remained throughout a simple merchant, a private gentleman. The stately language of the time touched his style with something of Shakespearian fancy, something of Clarendon's intricate dignity; but the political restlessness of the same span of time affected him not at all. Through the evil days of the Rebellion it would have been no marvel if a man had lost all trust in his fellow-men; and Walton remained the most trustful man that ever lived. Through the solemn days of the Puritan influence it would not have been wonderful if Walton had shared in the general gloom of behaviour

and of thought; and there was no man more consistently cheerful than he. Scarce a soul escaped the gay influence of the Restoration; but Walton, does one like it or like it not, never even caught a savour of the spirit of that emancipated time. He reminds me of the curiously apathetic yet very full character distinguishing the many provincial men and women who, though of sensitive disposition, have never been drawn within the various influences of a London life. When you discuss with such as these any general question of letters or art, you find that, in the measure proper to their talents, they are informed and skilful to judge. Touch upon any merely metropolitan topic and their interest presently becomes as stony as the Sphinx; or if not, their information is so ludicrously inaccurate, and their consequent judgment so childishly helpless, that the sole refuge is silence. So with Walton. Take him upon the question of some such philosophical contemplation as the sentiment of the times indulged in, and you will find him lively, agreeable, affecting; discuss the countryside with him, the flushings of its grasses, the strangeness of its sunsets, the circlings of its gnats at twilight, and you will catch him in a mood so delightful and observant that he becomes the best companion conceivable. As to his favourite

angling, was there ever such a fisherman in the world? In religion, again, he is orthodox, solemn, and satisfactorily righteous. But take him by the hand for an introduction to the civil movements of his time and you will presently dismiss him with, not contempt (for his goodness saves him from scorn) but, at any rate a perplexed smile and a distinct sentiment of superiority. In a word, there seldom lived a man so keenly affected by the various branches of knowledge in which he naturally took an interest, or so complacently indifferent to such events and theories as had no natural connexion with his