Introduction xxiii 



dissimilar paths which lead Piscator and Christian 

 alike to the City not built with hands. Both were 

 seekers for a City which to have sought through 

 life, in patience, honesty, loyalty, and love, is to 

 have found it. Of Walton's book we may say : 



" Landis amove twnes ? Sunt certa piacula quae te 

 Ter pure lecto poterunt recreare libello". 



WALTON AS A BIOGRAPHER 



It was probably by his Lives, rather than, in the 

 first instance, by his Angler > that Walton won the 

 liking of Dr. Johnson, whence came his literary 

 resurrection. It is true that Moses Browne and 

 Hawkins, both friends of Johnson's, edited The 

 Compleat Angler before 1775-1776, when we find 

 Dr. Home of Magdalene, Oxford, contemplating a 

 " benoted " edition of the Lives ^ by Johnson's ad- 

 vice. But the Walton of the Lives is, rather than 

 the Walton of the Angler, the man after Johnson's 

 own heart. The Angler is " a picture of my own 

 disposition" on holidays. The Lives display the 

 same disposition in serious moods, and in face of 

 the eternal problems of man's life in society. John- 

 son, we know, was very fond of biography, had 

 thought much on the subject, and, as Bos well notes, 

 "varied from himself in talk," when he discussed 

 the measure of truth permitted to biographers. " If 

 a man is to write a Panegyrick, he may keep vices 

 out of sight ; but if he professes to write a Life y he 

 must represent it as it really was." Peculiarities 

 were not to be concealed, he said, and his own were 

 not veiled by Boswell. " Nobody can write the life 

 of a man but those who have eat and drunk and 

 lived in social intercourse with him." " They only 

 who live with a man can write his life with any 



