The complete angler

Preface

CHARLES LAMB, in commending to Coleridge "The Complete Angler," added, " All the scientific part you may omit in reading; " and it is chiefly for those who, like Lamb, value Walton for his literary quality rather than his piscatorial lore, that this edition of his masterpiece is intended. Walton's text is given intact ; but the voluminous technical notes with which modern editors have expanded and qualified his precepts have been generally omitted. For like reasons, we have ventured (with some compunction) to divorce for the nonce " hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton" from his life-long companion. Cotton's supplement (appended to "The Angler" as Part II. since the fifth edition) is a brief treatise on fly-fishing, designed to supply the deficiencies in this branch of Part I. Cotton wrote his essay hurriedly in ten days ; and though still of some vi PREFACE.

technical interest, it falls far short of its prototype in literary worth. Briefly, we offer in the present edition the kernel of the larger ones, — not, of course, with a notion of supplanting the latter, but with the hope of meeting contingencies where a small and portable volume is desirable.

Introduction

FREDERICK SCHLEGEL once observed — and Coleridge paid him the compliment of stealing the aphorism — that "every man is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian ; " is naturally predisposed to unriddle the pageant of which he finds himself a spectator, after the fashion of the Academy or of the Lyceum.

Perhaps we are not to apply this maxim of Schlegel's too literally ; but surely an arbitrary division of humanity into potential philosophers of one type or the other is too sweeping. The critics are not the only ones that come to the play; and quietly apart from the wrangling a-priorist and empiricist camps there has always been a section of mankind paradoxically styled "philosophical" because of a natural inability and distaste to philosophize at all. To such unharassed, piously receptive souls the senseworld is a delightful spectacle benevolently arranged for their entertainment, where the mechanism by which the ingenious illusion is produced may be admired and applauded, without being intrusively pried into. They come, as it were, to enjoy, not to judge ; to commend, not to fret over the price of admission, or to vex themselves and their neighbors with untimely misgivings as to foul weather impend-

Xll INTRODUCTION.

ing when the hour comes for leaving the playhouse. There is obviously a good deal to be said on the side of this easy sect, — sometimes, and not unreasonably, held by irreverent minds to be wiser than even the accredited Professors of Wisdom themselves. For since we now have it on the best philosophical authority that our transcendental pryings are in effect no better than a child's efforts to lay hold of the moon, it would seem, on Philosophy's own showing, to be high time for her votaries to turn from their noumenal will-o'-the-wisps, and to content themselves with enjoying where they are not permitted to comprehend.

With some reservations on the honorable score of an inbred religious bent, the author of the little book in the hand of the reader was a "philosopher" of the comfortable type indicated in the foregoing. / Izaak Walton was not the man to look Nature's gift-horses in the mouth. To his practical, shop-keeping sense an actual bird in the hand was worth any number of illusory birds in the metaphysical bush ; and we are inclined to believe that few men have entered this world blessed with a keener zest for its wholesomer pleasures (the " wireproved pleasures " of Milton), or, what is perhaps more to the point, kept that sense in its original nicety longer than this " Common Father of All Anglers." Nature, in balancing his account, has fondly placed it to the credit of Izaak Walton that for him no "fine, fresh May^ morning" ever dawned, no bird ever sang, or blossom shed its fragrance in vain. The outward details that remain to us of this life are sufficiently meagre; "comfortably " so, says Mr. Lowell, in the tone of one who

INTRODUCTION. xiii

has been in some sort a prey to modern journalistic espials.

Walton was born of a family of substantial yeomen at Stafford, on the 9th of August, 1593, the year of Marlowe's death, and twenty-two years before Shakespeare's. Of his family we know next to nothing, minute research having developed little more than the rather spectral fact that his father, Jervis Walton, was probably the second son of George Walton, sometime bailiff of Yoxhall. Of his school days there is no record. One fancies, however, that Izaak found the " contemplative man's recreation " more to his taste than the Classics ; as his writings testify that he had little Latin and no Greek, — his frequent quotations of authors who wrote only in Latin, as Gesner, Cardan, Aldrovandus, Rondeletius, and Albertus Magnus, being derived from Topsel's translation of Gesner, in whose voluminous history of animals the other writers are cited. His educational defects, except in the classics, were in a measure supplied by later reading, and especially by familiar converse with eminent and learned divines of his day, of whom, says the Oxford antiquary, Anthony a- Wood, "he was much beloved."

Some of Walton's critics have thought fit to sneer at, others, scarcely wiser, to gloss over, his imperfect attainments, and especially his defective Latinity. A lack of acquirements which are the indispensable prop and stay of mediocrity need not, however, detain us in the case of a man of real parts and performance. The learning of a Porson or an Erasmus would never have produced "The Complete Angler;" and had xiv INTRODUCTION.

Walton, who revered learning, been nourished on a diet of Greek roots and particles, England would perhaps have gained a pedant at the price of a man of original merit and savor, — in most cases an undesirable exchange. Among the trivialities of pettifogging criticism there is, perhaps, none more abject than this belittling an author of natural gifts and invention on the score of his minor lapses in scholarship. Even Shakespeare has been brayed at for such slips as placing a seaport in Bohemia.

Walton went up to London from Staffordshire sometime before 1619, and, until the date of his retirement in 1664 with a modest fortune, he seems to have followed the trade of a linendraper. His first settlement in London as a shopkeeper was at the Royal Exchange in Cornhill ; and the fact that the shops round the Exchange were but seven and a half feet long by five wide has started one of his editors, the fastidious Mr. Major, on the eminently British conjecture that Walton must have been a wholesale dealer, because his shop was too small for the display of goods. This well-meant theory, benevolently devised to disinfect a vulgar occupation, has been properly upset and laughed at by later editors; and it will probably seem of little moment to any one outside a class treated at some length by Thackeray, whether a man who could write the "Lives" and " The Angler " thought fit to serve his customers by the piece or by the gross.

Sometime before 1624 Walton left the Exchange, and we find it recorded that " he dwelt on the north side of Fleet Street, in a house two doors west of Chancery Lane, and abutting on a messuage known

INTRODUCTION. XV

by the sign of ' The Harrow.' " His last settlement in the city was, according to the parish register of Saint Dunstan, in the seventh house from the corner of Chancery Lane; and we find it further recorded that he filled successively the parish offices of scavenger (not, we may suppose, in a malodorous way), juryman, constable, grand-juryman, overseer of the poor, and vestryman. During his busy London life Walton's chief recreation was, of course, angling, — an amusement profanely described by Swift, who, indeed, stopped at nothing, as " a stick and a string, with a fly at one end and a fool at the other." In this gentle, maligned craft, Izaak was accounted the greatest proficient of his time; and his favorite haunt for the sport seems to have been the Lea, — a stream, we fancy, long stripped of its trout, to say nothing of its pleasant Waltonian inns, with their " lavender in the windows and twenty ballads stuck about the walls." These quaint hostelries inspired some of Walton's most characteristic passages. He never tires of ringing his pleasant changes upon their homely cheer; and one may venture to conjecture that if the joys awaiting good men in the next world are benevolently adjusted to their preferences in this, Izaak Walton is now reaping the reward of a well-spent life, in some celestial inn, o'ergrown with woodbine and honeysuckle, and presided over by a seraphic hostess " cleanly and handsome and civil " beyond the hostesses of this grosser mould.

Walton was twice married, and, true to his predilection for the clergy, he went to them each time for his wife. His first venture was Rachel Floud, maternally descended from Archbishop Cranmer. By

XVi INTRODUCTION.

her, who died in 1640, he had six sons and one daughter, all of whom died in infancy or early childhood. His second wife, to whom he was married in 1646, was Anne, daughter of Thomas Ken, and sister of Dr. Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, one of the stubborn seven sent to the Tower by James II. Of this marriage there were three children, — one son, Izaak, who lived but a short time ; a daughter, Anne ; and another Izaak, who survived his father, and died in 1 719, a canon of Salisbury and a worthy "brother of the angle." Anne Ken, the second wife, died in 1662, as appears by a monumental inscription in the cathedral church of Worcester. Her epitaph, one of the quaintest of its kind and decked with sundry choice flowers of mortuary rhetoric, closes with the pious sentiment : —

"She dyed, (Alas that she is dead!)

the 17TH of April, 1662, aged 52

Study to be like her"

Of Walton's later life we know little, save that it was well spent. Somewhere about this period (1644- 1646) he left London, and, with a fortune far short of what would now be termed a competence, retired to a small estate in Staffordshire, not far from his birthplace. In the words of Wood, "finding it dangerous for honest men to be there, he left the city, and lived sometimes at Stafford, and elsewhere ; but mostly in the families of the eminent clergymen of England, by whom he was much beloved." It will be remembered that the term " honest " had a religious and political import at that time; and that

INTRODUCTION. XV11

Walton occasionally suffered for his loyalty to Church and King, we have some hints in his " Life of Sanderson." That a good share of his leisure was spent with his friend and adopted son, Charles Cotton, a good poet, a cheerful man, and an angler scarcely second to Walton himself, there is no doubt. Cotton was a royalist country-gentleman of Beresford in Staffordshire, whose handsome estate, Mr. Lowell thinks, "after sidling safely through the intricacies of the civil war, trickled pleasantly away through the chinks of its master's profusion." He had built a little fishing-house, marked with his own and Walton's initials "twisted in cypher," on the banks of the Dove ; and the two friends must have spent many a pleasant morning together whipping the waters of the stream, and conversing of the authors they knew so well.

Of the efficacy of the "most honest, ingenious, quiet, and harmless art of angling " in preserving the sound mind in the sound body, he himself was a living proof. He assures us in his will, written by himself at near ninety, that he is " in perfect memory ; " and we find him at eighty-three planning a pilgrimage of more than a hundred miles — a serious matter at that day — to join his friend Cotton in fishing in the Dove.

Walton died on the fifteenth day of December, 1683, in his ninetieth year, at Winchester, and lies buried in a chapel in the south aisle of the cathedral. The verses to his memory, inscribed on a large flat slab of black marble, are so far from being what he would term "choicely good" that we refrain from quoting them.

XViii INTRODUCTION.

We may now run over briefly the dates and titles of Walton's writings. His first appearance as an author seems to have been in 1633, in an Elegy which accompanied the first edition of Donne's poems Walton, though his taste in poetry was good, could boast but a limited share of the accomplishment of verse; and the Elegy is neither above nor below his modest poetical level, Where his poetry is passable, it is chiefly because his prose merits, his amiable sincerity, and succinct phrase have crept in,

Scarcely second in importance to " The Complete Angler " are the " Lives." Boswell records that this work was a prime favorite with Dr. Johnson; and he adds that the Doctor once observed (rather in Mr. Major's vein) that " it was wonderful that Walton, who was in a very low situaticn in life, should have been familiarly received by so many great men, and that at a time when the ranks of society were kept more separate than they are now."

There is perhaps ground for holding the gentle and courteous Walton's welcome in good society less "wonderful" than that of the Doctor himself, — though Boswell is not likely to have suggested it.

The inception of the " Lives " was due to a happy chance. While living in the parish of St. Dunstan in the West, Walton became the friend and frequent hearer of its vicar, the famous Dr. Donne, who was also dean of St. Paul's. Upon Donne's death in 1 63 1, he was engaged to collect materials for a "Life" which Sir Henry Wotton, provost of Eton College, was to write ; but Wotton dying before the

INTRODUCTION, XIX

completion of his task, Walton was persuaded to go on with it ; and the " Life " was accordingly finished — to the great satisfaction of Donne's friends — and published with a collection of the Doctor's sermons in 1640.

■Walton's turn for biography having thus happily discovered itself, he found no lack of employment for the future. His remaining lives comprise Wotton (1651), Richard Hooker (1665), George Herbert (1670), and Bishop Sanderson (1678).

"The Complete Angler " appeared in 1653, though it is probable it was begun some years before that. Owing to the engaging nature of subject and treatment, the work met with great success, reaching five editions in the author's lifetime, the second in 1655, the third in 1664, the fourth in 1668, and the fifth in 1676. To the fifth edition was added a Second Part, written at Walton's request by his friend Cotton, and described as being " Instructions how to angle for a trout or grayling in a clear stream." It is really a treatise on fly-fishing, a branch in which Cotton was proficient and of which Walton knew very little, and it was intended by Walton to supplement the technical deficiency of his own work. Cotton's part is in form a continuation of "The Angler;" the dialogue is retained, some of the former characters reappear, and there is an evident effort throughout to catch the tone of the original: but the charm is gone ; it is Walton, in short, minus what is peculiarly Walton, — salt without its savor,

Walton's last literary task was the editing, and in a measure the re-writing, of "Thealma and Clearchus," a "pastoral history" written by a certain

XX INTRODUCTION.

John Chalkhill, whose not very important identity has been the theme of much learned discussion.

Walton's life, stretching over nearly a century, from the golden days when Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger, and the rest of the Elizabethan "singingbirds " nested in the Mermaid, to the soberer era when Dryden swayed the sceptre of taste and letters at Will's coffee-house, opens many vistas to the fancy, It saw, in its quiet course, the imperious drama of Elizabeth's reign dwindle to its sorry conclusion, — the peevish, sick-room tyranny of a dying old woman, reft of her arrogant illusions, doubtful at last even of her own charms, sans friends, sans flatterers, a sapless kernel shrivelling away from its gilded court -husk ; it saw the fall of Bacon, Strafford, and Laud, the rise of Pym, Hampden, and Cronv well; it heard the clash of pike and rapier at Edgehill and Marston Moor, and saw the standard that was raised at Nottingham go down in blood at Naseby ; it saw the laurels won for England under the Protectorate fade after the Restoration, and heard the thunder of the Dutch cannon in the Medway, — an ominous alarum that, as Pepys says, made " everybody nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him."

Owing to a method of writing history now somewhat discredited, it is events and characters like these that stir the fancy when we recall the England of Walton's date. The past has been so strained of its prose by the sieves of historians jealous for "the dignity of history," that we scarcely realize that, after all, it is the outwardly humdrum fortunes of Hodge and his kindred that form the weft and the

INTRODUCTION. xxi

warp of the nation's annals; and that in the days when the bickerings of King and Parliament were ruffling its surface, the main current of England's national life was flowing quietly enough. Izaak Walton, we may be sure, had no desire to follow the thundering drum, or to "go a-angling" in the turbid pool of politics. His party fervor was not of the feverish pitch that sets men upon convicting their fellow-citizens of error by the final logic of throatcutting; so when the clouds of civil strife blackened over London, like a prudent man and a thrifty linendraper, he put up his shutters, dismissed his 'prentices, packed his rods and his tackle, and hied away to the streams of quiet Staffordshire, where the trout were leaping into the sunshine, and the wary chub hung mid-deep in the shadows, and the pike lurked solitary in his jungle under the lily-pads. Like the prudent Mr. Piscator in " The Angler," when the shower came up, he seated himself under a honeysuckle hedge and waited till it was over.

To more ardent spirits than his, this withdrawal from active partisanship to the more congenial paths of authorship and angling may smack unpleasantly of lukewarmness, not to say timidity; and Walton has been charged with both. Be that as it may, we at least have some reason to be thankful that Izaak Walton, instead of vaporing with Charles's cavaliers or singing truculent psalms with Oliver's roundheads, chose to serve his country according to his gifts by composing the " Lives " and " The Angler." Perhaps, too, Walton, as a contemplative man, reflected that if there was fighting to be done, there were plenty to do it out of sheer love for the game, not xxii INTR OD UCTION.

unmingled perhaps with a little human weakness touching the final sharing of spoils. Fruitful lives like his, too, are not to be played fast and loose with. What had the world lost had Shakespeare fallen in some civil chance-medley of the times, — like the Essex brawl, — or had rare Ben Jonson been spitted on a Spanish pike in the Low Countries?

But not to multiply casuistry here, let us pass on to a point at which Walton is plainly and ludicrously lacking. Oddly enough, it is a point at which he is in some respects strongest, — his sympathies. He speaks in the most tenderly caressing way of " the little living creatures with which the sun and summer adorn and beautify the river-banks and meadows ; " he is loath even to disturb at its sweet labor "the little contemptible winged creature, namely, the laborious bee ; " he is as tender as Chaucer is of the blackbird and thrassel, the titlark, the little linnet, and "the honest robin that loves mankind both alive and dead;" in short, the sunny heart of Walton has a ray of kindness for all God's humbler creatures, — except the fish. Here he is adamant. An angler, he tells us, does no harm but to the fish, and incidentally, of course, to the thousand and one luckless beings he baits his hook with ; but this he counts as nothing. We have searched his pages in vain for a single expression of regret for the (from the fishes' point of view) devilish tortures he incites his disciples to inflict. Once we fancied we saw a ray of hope ; but it soon vanished : after describing to his " loving scholar " the proper mode of putting a frog upon the hook, he deceptively adds : " and in so doing, use him as though you loved him, that is.

introduction: xxiii

harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live the longer," 1 — that is, that he may serve as bait the longer. The moment one of his "little living creatures " presents itself in the guise of bait, it forfeits all claim upon the otherwise abundant sympathy of Izaak Walton. Several writers, notably Byron and Leigh Hunt, have railed at him on this score; the former irreverently declaring in " Don Juan " that —

" That quaint, old, cruel coxcomb in his gullet Should have a hook and a small trout to pull it ; "

while Hunt, perhaps more with an eye to the capabilities in the way of literary development of the point of view than out of any tenderness for the fish, wrote : —

"Now fancy a Genius fishing/<?r us. Fancy him baiting a great hook with pickled salmon, and twitching up old Izaak Walton from the banks of the river Lea, with the hook through his ear. How he would go up, roaring and screaming, and thinking the devil had got him !

' Other joys Are but toys.'"

As intimated in the preface, this edition of Walton's masterpiece is designed chiefly for those who wish to enjoy it as a piece of literature rather than to consult it as a manual on fishing; and indeed we fancy that, in the latter capacity, it is largely superseded. Passing over, then, its technical features, let us consider briefly what are the literary qualities which account for its survival and constant popularity, and make its author, with his relatively limited attainments and moderate production, one of the best known of the

XXIV INTRODUCTION.

older prose writers. Walton's vogue is doubtless largely due to the great men who have rung his praises ; for his distinctive note in authorship, especially where it is most winning, is not of the resonant pitch that readily strikes the popular ear. Walter Scott, Dr. Johnson, Hallam, Lowell, Sheridan, Irving, have praised him ; and Charles Lamb said, among other pleasant things, of " The Angler," that it " would sweeten a man's temper at any time to read it, and Christianize every discordant passion." The key in which Lamb's encomium is pitched, and the indulgent, half-petting tone so often assumed toward Walton is no bad clew to his genre as a writer. One would scarcely venture on patronizing or petting the authors, say, of the " Novum Organum " and the " Principia." Walton's fame rests on no imposing achievement of intellectual power or sustained elevation of style and sentiment. His merits are of the kindlier sort that grace the reverend names of Goldsmith, Steele, Montaigne, of Samuel Pepys, even, with whose cheerful garrulity he has much in common. The pleasure " The Angler " gives us is akin to that we take in the artless prattle of children ; and no corrupt nature, we think, ever found pleasure in either. Frankness, innocence, the naive display of an engaging personality, a piety free from the twang of the conventicle, — these, mainly, are the saving qualities, the myrrh and frankincense that have kept this modest pastoral fresh and fragrant while so many pompous folios have been forgotten. Frankness is perhaps the virtue that lies at the root and feeds the blossom of Walton's charm ; and certainly the Muses have few gifts of which they are more chary.

INTRODUCTION. XXV

Like the black tulip, its value is the " scarcity value." There is no lack of orally garrulous Pepyses and Boswells, — fiuentraconteztrswith. memories of orient richness ; how rare, on the contrary, the Pepyses and Boswells who write ! Put but a pen in his hand, , and it is a hundred to one that the most ingenuous " agreeable rattle " of club and drawing-room is struck with sterility.

Considered as a matter of literary form, it is true that Walton's artlessness, his concise simplicity of phrase, is not always as artless as it looks ; and Mr. Lowell has shown that a certain fine line of his 1 is the chastened result of repetition and experiment. Artistic nicety is not, however, incompatible with candor; Pheidias was more plain-spoken than the rude fashioners of the sexless xoana ; and the works of the guileless, amiably discursive Walton form no exception to the rule that the passages in an author which flow easiest are nine times in ten precisely the ones that have received his most careful elaboration. Again, much of Walton's charm is due to a turn, too rarely exercised, for infusing into his own style something of the enchanting quaintness of phrase and fancy of his great contemporaries Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne. There are crotchets and turns in the " Lives " and " The Angler " that Browne might have envied and Lamb have echoed; and in Walton's choicer passages the earmarks with delight that winding, "many-membered " period, fluctuating like the wayward melody of the wind-harp, borne (as

1 " These hymns are now lost to us, but doubtless they were such as they two now sing in heaven." — Life of Herbert.

XXVI INTRODUCTION.

it seems) unpremeditated upon the wing of the fancies it embodies, which Taylor taught his contemporaries, and himself carried to perfection in that famous description of the lark: —

" For so I have seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, soaring upward and singing as he rises and hopes to get to Heaven, and climb above the clouds ; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than it could recover by the vibration and frequent weighing of its wings ; till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant and stay till the storm was over ; and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing as if it had learned music and motion from an angel as he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries here below."

The reader of " The Angler " will not fail to mark that Walton's style is extremely uneven. Like the author of " The Urn Burial," he is fine in flashes ; and one sometimes wonders while reading him that a man who can write so well should at times take it upon his conscience to write so ill.

But Izaak Walton's oases, his green and watered places, are frequent enough ; and the conscientious reader who toils his way through the briery jungles (and even there he may pluck an occasional berry) of the tangled dissertations on hooks and tackle and bait and primitive piety, may be cheerfully sure of emerging presently in some green meadow studded with cowslips and lady-smocks and sweet with the breath of hawthorn and honeysuckle, where the larks are soaring skyward, and tuneful milkmaids

INTRODUCTION. XXV11

are singing the smooth verses of Kit Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh.

Such were the scenes that Walton loved ; and it is perhaps the prime merit of " The Angler " that it induces a relish for scenes like them. It tempts us out of doors, and renews our taste for the wholesome pleasures of the country, — for the primitive sights and sounds and odors to which, as the poets who know life best have told us, the jaded senses turn back with longing when the hand of the ringer is at the passing bell. Even obscene old Falstaff, steeped in the riot of tavern and brothel, when the end came, " babbled of green fields."

But it is time for the present writer to step aside, and to say, with courteous Mr. Piscator, " I cry you mercy for being so long, and thank you for your patience."

E. G. J.

October, 1892.

Dttucattom

TO THE RIGHT WORSHIPFUL

JOHN OFFLEY,

OF MADELEY MANOR, IN THE COUNTY OF STAF- FORD, ESQ.

My most honored Friend :

Sir, — I have made so ill use of your former favors as by them to be encouraged to entreat that they may be enlarged to the patronage and protection of this book. And I have put on a modest confidence that I shall not be denied, because it is a Discourse of Fish and Fishing, which you know so well, and both love and practise so much.

You are assured, though there be ignorant men of another belief, that Angling is an art, and you know that art better than others; and that this truth is demonstrated by the fruits of that pleasant labor which you enjoy when you purpose to give rest to your mind, and divest yourself of your more serious business, and, which is often, dedicate a day or two to this recreation.