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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 Gold smith, 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 naïve 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.

Like the black tulip, its value is the "scarcity value." There is no lack of orally garrulous Pepyses and Boswells, fluent raconteurs with 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 ear marks with delight that winding, "many-membered" period, fluctuating like the wayward melody of the wind-harp, borne (as

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

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 his conscience to write so ill.

upon

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

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."

October, 1892.

E. G. J.