LISTS OF ARTIFICIAL FLIES FOR THE MONTHS OF JANUARY, FEBRUARY, MARCH, APRIL, AND MAY; SHOWING ALSO HOW OF THE STONE-FLY; ALSO A LIST OF FLIES FOR JUNE, JULY, AUGUST, SEPTEMBER, OCTOBER, NOVEMBER, AND DECEM- CONTAINS DIRECTIONS TOUCHING ANGLING AT THE MIDDLE WITH A MINNOW FOR TROUT, AND WITH A WORM, GRUB, OR • 461 ZAAC WALTON was born at Stafford, on the Ninth of August, 1593. We are in absolute ignorance of how and where he passed his youth; but we feel sure that it was a simple, manly, and godly youth. The early years of it would probably be spent at Stafford, where, too, he may have imbibed that love of angling which stayed with him in late years, and gave rise to the most beautiful English pastoral of its kind. We can only imagine the journey of the youth to London town to work his way in the world; but in the year 1643 we find him settled in London, and following the trade of a sempster. He had a shop in the Royal Bourse, on Cornhill. Sir John Hawkins says: "In this situation he Of could scarcely be said to have elbow-room, for the shops over the Bourse were but seven feet and a half long and five wide; yet here did he carry on his trade till some time before the year 1624, when he dwelt on the north side Fleet Street, in a house two doors west of the end Chancery Lane and in this house he is, in the deed above referred to, said to have followed the trade of a linendraper. It further appears by that deed that the house was in the joint occupation of Izaac Walton, and John Mason, hosier, from whence we may conclude that half a shop was sufficient for the business of Walton!" We would rather conclude, however, that he was a wholesale merchant, and that the small shop was in reality an office, where it is possible that he and Mason may have been in partnership. He afterwards moved to a house in Chancery Lane, a few doors higher up on the left hand than the former. Walton was married twice. His first marriage was to Rachel Floud, a descendant of Archbishop Cranmer, at Canterbury, in the month of December, 1626. He had seven children by this marriage; but they all died young, and his wife died in 1640. He was married again, about the year 1646, to Anne, the daughter of Mr. Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, one of the seven that were sent to the Tower, and who at the Revolution was deprived and died in retirement. Walton seems to have been as happy in the married state as the society and friendship of a prudent and pious woman of great endowments could make him. At the age of fifty he retired from business, upon a very moderate fortune, which was, however, amply sufficient for his simple needs. He left London, “judging it dangerous for honest men to be there," and lived sometimes at his native town, "but mostly in the families of the eminent clergymen of England, of whom he was much beloved." Angling was, of course, his recreation at all convenient times, and he appears to have chiefly fished in the river Lea. In the year 1662 his wife died, and was buried at Worcester. Living while in London in the parish of St. Dunstan's in the West, of which Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, was vicar, he became a frequent hearer of that excellent preacher, and at length, as he himself says in some verses at the end of his Life of Dr. Donne, his convert. Upon his decease in 1631, Sir Henry Wotton (of whom more hereafter) requested Walton to collect materials for a Life of the doctor, which, it seems, Sir Henry had undertaken to write; but Sir Henry dying before he had completed the Life, Walton undertook it himself, and in the year 1640 printed and published it, with a collection of the doctor's sermons, in folio. As soon as the book came out, a complete copy was sent as a present to Walton by Mr. John Donne, the doctor's son, afterwards doctor of laws, and one of the blank leaves contained his letter to Mr. Walton. The letter is yet extant and in print, and is a handsome and grateful acknowledgment of the honour done to the memory of his father. Dr. King, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, in a letter to Walton, thus expresses himself concerning this Life: "I am glad that the general demonstration of his (Dr. Donne's) worth was so fairly preserved and represented to the world by your pen, in the history of his life; indeed so well, that, besides others, Mr. John Hales, of Eaton, affirmed to me he had not seen a Life written with more advantage to the subject, or reputation to the writer, than that of Dr. Donne." Sir Henry Wotton dying in 1639, Walton was importuned by Bishop King to undertake the writing his Life also, which Walton accordingly did. Before Walton's time the literature of angling had been very scanty. In the year 1653, when he was sixty, Walton published his "Complete Angler." It at once attained a wide popularity, reaching a second edition in 1655, a third in 1664, a fourth in 1668, and a fifth (the last in the author's life) in 1676. Each edition was improved and altered from its predecessor: in the second edition a new interlocutor, Auceps, was introduced; the third and fourth editions had several entire new chapters; and the fifth contains no less than eight chapters more than the first, and twenty pages more than the fourth. When the fifth edition was being prepared, his friend and adopted son, Charles Cotton, wrote a second part in pursuance of a prior arrangement between Walton and himself. This second part being approved of by Walton, was added to the book, and they came out together. Mr. Cotton's book had the title of the "Complete Angler; being Instruction how to Angle for a Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream" (Part II.), and it has ever since been received as a second part of Walton's book. In the title-page is a cypher which Cotton had caused to be cut on stone and set up over the door of a small fishing-box that he had erected near his dwelling on the bank of the Dove. Two years after the Restoration Walton wrote the Life of Mr. Richard Hooker, author of the "Ecclesiastical Polity;" he was enjoined to undertake this work by his friend Dr. |