COTTON AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 61 



and gave him command of the expedition 

 against the Spaniards in the West Indies, 

 which though unsuccessful resulted in the add- 

 ing of Jamaica to our growing empire. A 

 quarrelsome man was Robert Venables, and it 

 was his quarrels with Admiral Penn which 

 caused the expedition to miscarry. Cromwell, 

 who forgave not failure, clapped both general 

 and admiral into the Tower, but Venables was 

 pardoned, though deprived of his general's 

 commission. At the Restoration he followed 

 Monck, who made him governor of Chester. 

 But Charles II. passed him over, and it is prob- 

 ably to this fact that the world owes a first-rate 

 fishing book. Walton, though a stranger to 

 Venables, wrote an introductory letter to it, full 

 of delicate flattery. 



So far three of the five are Cromwellians : the 

 other two are royalists, and they, you will ob- 

 serve, keep slightly to themselves, not very sure 

 of the company into which chance has thrown 

 them. It is superfluous to say much about 

 Izaak Walton and the Compleat Angler. 

 Possibly no single volume except the Bible is so 

 well known by name, and few are more widely 

 esteemed. True, it contains nothing original 

 on fly fishing, but it is not as a writer on fly 

 fishing or even on fishing generally that Walton 

 is read, for he is an idyllist, a moralist, an ob- 

 server of nature and a master of a prose style 

 which lives because it is individual. The book 

 is of immense importance in a history of fishing, 



