BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICES OF WALTON AND COTTON. THE family of Walton is said to have been respectable, and his father, Jervis Walton, to have been in easy circumstances. IZAAK WALTON was born in the month of August 1593; and on the 21st of September following he was baptized, in the parish of St. Mary, Stafford. A notion has extensively prevailed that his mother was a Cranmer; but this has been sufficiently disproved by Dr. Barret. We have little information concerning his education or the period of his first entrance into mercantile life: even the precise nature of his occupation is little better known. In a deed, dated 1624, he is described as "Izaac Walton, linen draper," and it appears by the same instrument that he then occupied, jointly with John Mason a hosier, a house on the north side of Fleetstreet, two doors west of the end of Chancery-lane, London. On the authority of another vetus autographum," Sir John Hawkins has designated him a sempster ol milliner, and so he is styled by Anthony a Wood; but, according to the tradition still preserved in his family, his occupation was that of a Hamburgh merchant or wholesale linen draper. About the year 1624, Izaak married Rachell, the daughter (it should seem,) of Archdeacon Edmund Cranmer, and niece of that distinguished prelate, Thor mer, Archbishop of Canterbury. lady he had two children, neither lived twelve months. In the troublesome and unhap which closed the reign of the un Charles Stuart, Walton, whose lo dered him obnoxious to the ruling sustained considerable inconvenic had already lost his first wife, an he accordingly left London and his native town of Stafford, where to have spent so much of his tim not devoted to his vocation as ler, in books, and in that con which Lord Bacon justly conside life of study. To have been even ed with such men as Archbishops Sheldon; Bishops Morton, Pears derson and Ken; Chillingworth, Donne, Wotton, Savile, Shirley th tist, and John Hales of Eton, was mon happiness; but to enjoy their was in itself a testimony to his n intellectual excellence. The most popular production ton's pen is, without exception, h ful Treatise on Angling, which published in 1653, and passed th fewer than five Editions in the of the Author. On this beautiful would be impertinent here to dil every reader form his own judgm On the 9th of August 1683, his 90 day, he made his last will. It begi good old style with the following confession of his faith: "First, I d my belief to be, that there is only Who hath made the whole world, and all mankind; to Whom I shal account of all my actions, which are not to be justified, but I hope pardoned, for the merits of my Saviour Jesus: and because the profession of Christianity does, at this time, seem to be subdivided into Papist and Protestant, I take it, at least, to be convenient to declare my belief to be, in all points of faith, as the church of England now professeth; and this I do the rather, because of a very long and very true friendship with some of the Roman church." Having thus fully enjoyed that blessing, quiete et pure actæ ætatis placida et lenis senectus, on the 15th of December 1683 the spirit of this just man returned to the God Who gave it. He died at Winchester, at the prebendal house of Dr. William Hawkins, his son-in-law, and was interred in the chapel of Prior Silksted, in the cathedral of that city. By his second wife, Anne, the sister of the exemplary Bishop Ken, he left one son, ("young Master Izaak Walton,") who died unmarried, in 1716, a Canon of Salisbury, and a daughter Anne, the wife of Dr.Hawkins. The only offspring of this marriage was William Hawkins, Serjeant-at-law, one of the most learned and distinguished lawyers of the last century; and he left a son and three daughters, of whom the widow of the late Rev. Mr. Hawes, rector of Bemerton, is now the only survivor. |