INTRODUCTION IZAAK WALTON was born at Stafford in 1593, and died at London in 1683. Of his life there is little eventful to chronicle. He belonged to that noble class of men which seems to have been indigenous in no other country save England, and whose peculiarity is to be distinguished by that engrossing commingling of qualities, the trader's craft and the art of the man of letters. Trade and art have so long accepted different lodgings that the mention of one is, in these faded times, the necessary exclusion of the other. But, in Walton's day, such a mutual repulsion had no sympathy with common thought. Such a man as he might give his business hours to merchandise and ledgers and his leisure to art and polite. learning without betraying his caste, and even with the chance of pleasing a difficult posterity. It was a chance which, in Walton's case, proved a happy one. Though not exactly constructed by nature for classic literary work, he belonged, nevertheless, to that curious rank of literary men who are destined to persuade, to amuse, and to entertain succeeding generations by exceptionally engaging gifts of character. Of such-though his character was vastly different, and was engaging, too, for very different reasons-was Boswell, the best of his kind. Walton's gifts came, so far as character was concerned, from the metal of the strong and sturdy mint of seventeenth-century England: he belonged essentially to the middle classes of his time; his religion was convinced, he had no doubts nor fears; mystery and all the burden of this unintelligible world had their pigeon-holes in his mind with their solutions, marked as it were by the letters of the alphabet, and docketed 'for immediate reference. His love of gossip and of ghosts, his profound belief in the supernatural, his unswerving honesty, his sentiment of hero-worship, his model humility of speech rather than of meaning, all are pieces in the making of as transparent and simple a personality as literature reveals. Walton's fortune was to possess an inimitable manner, by which he summed himself up with a thousand others of his class through one channel of expression. Shortly after his coming of age he started his career as a small draper in a tiny shop on the Exchange; and there, in his quiet way, he must have prospered, for a decade of years later he moved thence to Fleet Street, where he rented a shop within three paces of the south end of Chancery Lane. A little later in life he moved again to within a very few yards of his second home, whither in the year 1626 he brought his wife from Canterbury, one Rachel Floud, descended on the side of her mother from Archbishop Cranmer. This lady became the sad mother of seven children who all died in early childhood, she herself following her grief to the grave in the year 1640, after fourteen years of married life. Six years after his first wife's death Walton married Anne Ken, sister of that famous Bishop whose uprightness and piety have long been, as they deserve to be, part of the glory of the Church of England. He was one of the seven who resisted James the Second's notorious claim to the dispensing power, and whose handiwork is familiar in the Hymnody of his Church. Walton outlived, too, his second spouse, and spent the last twenty years of his life a widower, comforted by a son and a daughter, and busy with his literary labours. He was one of those whose literary work is identified with maturity of life and ripeness of years. His first published Life, that of Donne, did not appear until the year of his first wife's death when he himself was forty-seven years of age. The Compleat Angler did not see light until he was sixty; and not until he had well passed his seventieth year did he publish that which is perhaps the most admirable of all his writings, the life of Richard Hooker; the Wotton appeared still later, and the life of Dr. Sanderson was written when Walton was actually in his eighty-fifth year. He died at Winchester, the contemporary of Shakespeare and Spenser in youth and of Sir Isaac Newton in eld. It is a little difficult to appraise quite at its natural merit Walton's English manner. Of the style which makes literature stately which orders its words in grand cycles and marshals its thoughts with something of the rhythm of the inevitable motions of nature, he had but little. He wrote out his charming little ideas just as they occurred to him. There is something engrossingly minor about nearly everything that he ever produced. He is little, not as a small man is little to the eyes of his greater fellows, but as a beautiful insect is little to the eyes of man. He potters 'tis the only word for his pervasive manner; but he potters with delicious ease and unconsciousness. Few writings are so conversational as his; and there would seem to be few men whose conversation was better worth attending. There are greater, far greater, writers than he, with whom, nevertheless, the reader is never taken, within a very long span, into a confidence so intimate. Barrow, Hooker, and, above all, Jeremy Taylor stand before you as it were in a magisterial array, and utter great words which take up all your admiration and engross to the full your sense of wonder and zeal for the House of Letters; but Walton just throws himself into an arm-chair, and chatters, chatters, without ceasing, without much construction, and occasionally with somewhat personal grammar. Of the Bishop of Durham he remarks, for example, that he is 'one that |