xxiv The Complete Angler 



genuine exactness and discrimination; and few 

 people who have lived with a man know what to 

 remark about him." Walton had lived much in the 

 society of his subjects, Donne and Wotton ; with 

 Sanderson he had a slighter acquaintance ; George 

 Herbert he had only met ; Hooker, of course, he 

 had never seen in the flesh. It is obvious to every 

 reader that 



^ 



are his best. IrT~Donne's Life he feels that he is 

 writmg^of an English St. Austin, "for I think 

 none was so like him before his conversion ; none so 

 like St. Ambrose after it : and if his youth had the 

 infirmities of the one, his age had the excellencies 

 of the other ; the learning and holiness of both ". 



St. Augustine made free confession of his own in- 

 firmities of youth. With gtat4elicacy Walton lets 

 Donne also confess himself, printing^ letter in which 

 he declines to take Holy Orders, because his course of 

 life when very young had been too notorious. Deli- 

 cacy and tact are as notable in Walton's account of 

 Donne's poverty, melancholy, and conversion through 

 the blessed means of gentle King Jamie. Walton 

 had an awful loyalty, a sincere reverence for the 

 office of a king. But wherever he introduces King 

 James, either in his Donne or his Wotton, you see 

 a subdued version of the King James of The For- 

 tunes of Nigel. The pedantry, the good nature, the 

 touchiness, the humour, the nervousness, are all 

 here. It only needs a touch of the king's broad 

 accent to set before us, as vividly as in Scott, the 

 interviews with Donne, and that singular scene when 

 Wotton, disguised as Octavio Baldi, deposits his long 

 rapier at the door of his majesty's chamber. Wotton, 

 in Florence, was warned of a plot to murder James 

 VI. The duke gave him "such Italian antidotes 

 against poison as the Scots till then had been 

 strangers to": indeed, there is no antidote for a 



