Introduction xv 



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, 

 f 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 con- 

 troversy. 



Walton brought out a second edition in 1655. He 

 rewrote the book, adding more than a third, sup- 

 pressing Viator, and introducing Venator. New 

 plates were added, and, after the manner of the 

 time, commendatory verses. A third edition ap- 

 peared in 1 66 1, 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 Uni- 

 versal 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 musics/ 

 of language of the great age. He is a friend of 

 " country contents " : no lover of the town, no keeff* 

 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, 



b 



