Introduction to the Compleat Angler

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Lang Andrew. Introduction to the Compleat Angler

ANDREW LANG’S INTRODUCTION TO THE COMPLEAT ANGLER

HIS LIFE

WALTON AS A BIOGRAPHER

THE COMPLEAT ANGLER

FISHING THEN AND NOW

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To write on Walton is, indeed, to hold a candle to the sun. The editor has been content to give a summary of the chief or rather the only known, events in Walton’s long life, adding a notice of his character as displayed in his Biographies and in The Compleat Angler, with comments on the ancient and modern practice of fishing, illustrated by passages from Walton’s foregoers and contemporaries. Like all editors of Walton, he owes much to his predecessors, Sir John Hawkins, Oldys, Major, and, above all, to the learned Sir Harris Nicolas.

Of Walton’s education nothing is known, except on the evidence of his writings. He may have read Latin, but most of the books he cites had English translations. Did he learn his religion from ‘his mother or his nurse’? It will be seen that the free speculation of his age left him untouched: perhaps his piety was awakened, from childhood, under the instruction of a pious mother. Had he been orphaned of both parents (as has been suggested) he might have been less amenable to authority, and a less notable example of the virtues which Anglicanism so vainly opposed to Puritanismism. His literary beginnings are obscure. There exists a copy of a work, The Loves of Amos and Laura, written by S. P., published in 1613, and again in 1619. The edition of 1619 is dedicated to ‘Iz. Wa.’: —

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The preacher and his convert had probably a similar history of the heart: as we shall see, Walton, like the Cyclops, had known love. Early in 1639, Wotton wrote to Walton about a proposed Life of Donne, to be written by himself, and hoped ‘to enjoy your own ever welcome company in the approaching time of the Fly and the Cork.’ Wotton was a fly-fisher; the cork, or float, or ‘trembling quill,’ marks Izaak for the bottom-fisher he was. Wotton died in December 1639; Walton prefixed his own Life of Donne to that divine’s sermons in 1640. He says, in the Dedication of the reprint of 1658, that ‘it had the approbation of our late learned and eloquent King,’ the martyred Charles I. Living in, or at the corner of Chancery Lane, Walton is known to have held parochial office: he was even elected ‘scavenger.’ He had the misfortune to lose seven children – of whom the last died in 1641 – his wife, and his mother-in-law. In 1644 he left Chancery Lane, and probably retired from trade. He was, of course, a Royalist. Speaking of the entry of the Scots, who came, as one of them said, ‘for the goods, – and chattels of the English,’ he remarks, ‘I saw and suffered by it.’ 2 He also mentions that he ‘saw’ shops shut by their owners till Laud should be put to death, in January 1645. In his Life of Sanderson, Walton vouches for an anecdote of ‘the knowing and conscientious King,’ Charles, who, he says, meant to do public penance for Strafford’s death, and for the abolishing of Episcopacy in Scotland. But the condition, ‘peaceable possession of the Crown,’ was not granted to Charles, nor could have been granted to a prince who wished to reintroduce Bishops in Scotland. Walton had his information from Dr. Morley. On Nov. 25, 1645, Walton probably wrote, though John Marriott signed, an Address to the Reader, printed, in 1646, with Quarles’s Shepherd’s Eclogues. The piece is a little idyll in prose, and ‘angle, lines, and flies’ are not omitted in the description of ‘the fruitful month of May,’ while Pan is implored to restore Arcadian peace to Britannia, ‘and grant that each honest shepherd may again sit under his own vine and fig-tree, and feed his own flock,’ when the King comes, no doubt. ‘About’ 1646 Walton married Anne, half-sister of Bishop Ken, a lady ‘of much Christian meeknesse.’ Sir Harris Nicolas thinks that he only visited Stafford occasionally, in these troubled years. He mentions fishing in ‘Shawford brook’; he was likely to fish wherever there was water, and the brook flowed through land which, as Mr. Marston shows, he acquired about 1656. In 1650 a child was born to Walton in Clerkenwell; it died, but another, Isaac, was born in September 1651. In 1651 he published the Reliquiae Wottonianae, with a Memoir of Sir Henry Wotton. The knight had valued Walton’s company as a cure for ‘those splenetic vapours that are called hypochondriacal.’

Worcester fight was on September 3, 1651; the king was defeated, and fled, escaping, thanks to a stand made by Wogan, and to the loyalty of Mistress Jane Lane, and of many other faithful adherents. A jewel of Charles’s, the lesser George, was preserved by Colonel Blague, who intrusted it to Mr. Barlow of Blore Pipe House, in Staffordshire. Mr. Barlow gave it to Mr. Milward, a Royalist prisoner in Stafford, and he, in turn, intrusted it to Walton, who managed to convey it to Colonel Blague in the Tower. The colonel escaped, and the George was given back to the king. Ashmole, who tells the story, mentions Walton as ‘well beloved of all good men.’ This incident is, perhaps, the only known adventure in the long life of old Izaak. The peaceful angler, with a royal jewel in his pocket, must have encountered many dangers on the highway. He was a man of sixty when he published his Compleat Angler in 1653, and so secured immortality. The quiet beauties of his manner in his various biographies would only have made him known to a few students, who could never have recognised Byron’s ‘quaint, old, cruel coxcomb’ in their author. ‘The whole discourse is a kind of picture of my own disposition, at least of my disposition in such days and times as I allow myself when honest Nat. and R. R. and I go a-fishing together.’ Izaak speaks of the possibility that his book may reach a second edition. There are now editions more than a hundred! Waltonians should read Mr. Thomas Westwood’s Preface to his Chronicle of the Compleat Angler: it is reprinted in Mr. Marston’s edition. Mr. Westwood learned to admire Walton at the feet of Charles Lamb: —

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