Introduction to the Compleat Angler . Lang Andrew
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: —
‘No fisher,
But a well-wisher
To the game,’
as Scott describes himself. 3
Lamb recommended Walton to Coleridge; ‘it breathes the very spirit of innocence, purity, and simplicity of heart;.. it would sweeten a man’s temper at any time to read it; it would Christianise every angry, discordant passion; pray make yourself acquainted with it.’ (Oct. 28, 1796.) According to Mr. Westwood, Lamb had ‘an early copy,’ found in a repository of marine stores, but not, even then, to be bought a bargain. Mr. Westwood fears that Lamb’s copy was only Hawkins’s edition of 1760. The original is extremely scarce. Mr. Locker had a fine copy; there is another in the library of Dorchester House: both are in their primitive livery of brown sheep, or calf. The book is one which only the wealthy collector can hope, with luck, to call his own. A small octavo, sold at eighteen-pence, The Compleat Angler was certain to be thumbed into nothingness, after enduring much from May showers, July suns, and fishy companionship. It is almost a wonder that any examples of Walton’s and Bunyan’s first editions have survived into our day. The little volume was meant to find a place in the bulging pockets of anglers, and was well adapted to that end. The work should be reprinted in a similar format: quarto editions are out of place.
The fortunes of the book, the fata libelli, have been traced by Mr. Westwood. There are several misprints (later corrected) in the earliest copies, as (p. 88) ‘Fordig’ for ‘Fordidg,’ (p. 152) ‘Pudoch’ for ‘Pudock.’ The appearance of the work was advertised in The Perfect Diurnal (May 9-16), and in No. 154 of The Mercurius Politicus (May 19-26), also in an almanack for 1654. Izaak, or his publisher Marriott, cunningly brought out the book at a season when men expect the Mayfly. Just a month before, Oliver Cromwell had walked into the House of Commons, in a plain suit of black clothes, with grey stockings. His language, when he spoke, was reckoned unparliamentary (as it undeniably was), and he dissolved the Long Parliament. While Marriott was advertising Walton’s work, Cromwell was making a Parliament of Saints, ‘faithful, fearing God, and hating covetousness.’ This is a good description of Izaak, but he was not selected. In the midst of revolutions came The Compleat Angler to the light, a possession for ever. Its original purchasers are not likely to have taken a hand in Royalist plots or saintly conventicles. They were peaceful men. A certain Cromwellian trooper, Richard Franck, was a better angler than Walton, and he has left to us the only contemporary and contemptuous criticism of his book: to this we shall return, but anglers, as a rule, unlike Franck, must have been for the king, and on Izaak’s side in controversy.
Walton brought out a second edition in 1655. He rewrote the book, adding more than a third, suppressing Viator, and introducing Venator. New plates were added, and, after the manner of the time, commendatory verses. A third edition appeared in 1661, a fourth (published by Simon Gape, not by Marriott) came out in 1664, a fifth in 1668 (counting Gape’s of 1664 as a new edition), and in 1676, the work, with treatises by Venables and Charles Cotton, was given to the world as The Universal Angler. Five editions in twelve years is not bad evidence of Walton’s popularity. But times now altered. Walton is really an Elizabethan: he has the quaint freshness, the apparently artless music of language of the great age. He is a friend of ‘country contents’: no lover of the town, no keen student of urban ways and mundane men. A new taste, modelled on that of the wits of Louis XIV., had come in: we are in the period of Dryden, and approaching that of Pope.
There was no new edition of Walton till Moses Browne (by Johnson’s desire) published him, with ‘improvements,’ in 1750. Then came Hawkins’s edition in 1760. Johnson said of Hawkins, ‘Why, ma’am, I believe him to be an honest man at the bottom; but, to be sure, he is penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality, and a tendency to savageness, that cannot easily be defended.’
This was hardly the editor for Izaak! However, Hawkins, probably by aid of Oldys the antiquary (as Mr. Marston shows), laid a good foundation for a biography of Walton. Errors he made, but Sir Harris Nicolas has corrected them. Johnson himself reckoned Walton’s Lives as ‘one of his most favourite books.’ He preferred the life of Donne, and justly complained that Walton’s story of Donne’s vision of his absent wife had been left out of a modern edition. He explained Walton’s friendship with persons of higher rank by his being ‘a great panegyrist.’
The eighteenth century, we see, came back to Walton, as the nineteenth has done. He was precisely the author to suit Charles Lamb. He was reprinted again and again, and illustrated by Stoddart and others. Among his best editors are Major (1839), ‘Ephemera’ (1853), Nicolas (1836, 1860), and Mr. Marston (1888).
The only contemporary criticism known to me is that of Richard Franck, who had served with Cromwell in Scotland, and, not liking the aspect of changing times, returned to the north, and fished from the Esk to Strathnaver. In 1658 he wrote his Northern Memoirs, an itinerary of sport, heavily cumbered by dull reflections and pedantic style. Franck, however, was a practical angler, especially for salmon, a fish of which Walton knew nothing: he also appreciated the character of the great Montrose. He went to America, wrote a wild cosmogonic work, and The Admirable and Indefatigable Adventures of the Nine Pious Pilgrims (one pilgrim catches a trout!) (London, 1708). The Northern Memoirs of 1658 were not published till 1694. Sir Walter Scott edited a new issue, in 1821, and defended Izaak from the strictures of the salmon-fisher. Izaak, says Franck, ‘lays the stress of his arguments upon other men’s observations, wherewith he stuffs his indigested octavo; so brings himself under the angler’s censure and the common calamity of a plagiary, to be pitied (poor man) for his loss of time, in scribbling and transcribing other men’s notions… I remember in Stafford, I urged his own argument upon him, that pickerel weed of itself breeds pickerel (pike).’ Franck proposed a rational theory, ‘which my Compleat Angler no sooner deliberated, but dropped his argument, and leaves Gesner to defend it, so huffed away… ’ ‘So note, the true character of an industrious angler more deservedly falls upon Merrill and Faulkner, or rather Izaak Ouldham, a man that fished salmon with but three hairs at hook, whose collections and experiments were lost with himself,’ – a matter much to be regretted. It will be observed, of course, that hair was then used, and gut is first mentioned for angling purposes by Mr. Pepys. Indeed, the flies which Scott was hunting for when he found the lost Ms. of the first part of Waverley are tied on horse-hairs. They are in the possession of the descendants of Scott’s friend, Mr. William Laidlaw. The curious angler, consulting Franck, will find that his salmon flies are much like our own, but less variegated. Scott justly remarks that, while Walton was habit and repute a bait-fisher, even Cotton knows nothing of salmon. Scott wished that Walton had made the northern tour, but Izaak would have been sadly to seek, running after a fish down a gorge of the Shin or the Brora, and the discomforts of the north would have finished his career. In Scotland he would not have found fresh sheets smelling of lavender.
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Sir Walter was fond of trout-fishing, and in his