xxxiv The Complete Angler 



These remarks show how Izaak was equipped in 

 books and in practical information : it follows that 

 his book is to be read, not for instruction, but for 

 human pleasure. 



So much for what Walton owed to others. For 

 all the rest, for what has made him the favourite of 

 schoolboys and sages, of poets and philosophers, he 

 is indebted to none but his Maker and his genius. 

 That he was a lover of Montaigne we know ; and, 

 had Montaigne been a fisher, he might have written 

 somewhat like Izaak, but without the piety, the 

 perfume, and the charm. There are authors whose 

 living voices, if we know them in the flesh, we seem 

 to hear in our ears as we peruse their works. Of 

 such was Mr. Jowett, sometime Master of Balliol 

 College, a good man, now with God. It has ever 

 seemed to me that friends of Walton must thus 

 have heard his voice as they read him, and that it 

 reaches us too, though faintly. Indeed, we have 

 here " a kind of picture of his own disposition," as 

 he tells us Piscator is the Walton whom honest 

 Nat. and R. Roe and Sir Henry Wotton knew on 

 fishing-days. The book is a set of confessions, 

 without their commonly morbid turn. " I write 

 not for money, but for pleasure," he says ; methinks 

 he drove no hard bargain with good Richard 

 Marriott, nor was careful and troubled about 

 royalties on his eighteenpenny book. He regards 

 scoffers as " an abomination to mankind," for indeed 

 even Dr. Johnson, who, a century later, set Moses 

 Browne on reprinting The Compleat Angler, broke 

 his jest on our suffering tribe. " Many grave, 

 serious men pity anglers," says Auceps, and Venator 

 styles them "patient men," as surely they have 

 great need to be. For our toil, like that of the 

 husbandman, hangs on the weather that Heaven 

 sends, and on the flies that have their birth or being 



