4 IZAAK WALTON AND HIS FRIENDS 



twenty years old. This alone shows that his 

 devotion to literature must have begun early 

 in his career; indeed, he appears to have been 

 possessed of an almost immoderate thirst for 

 knowledge. Most of his biographers state Walton 

 had but an imperfect education, and knew Latin 

 very imperfectly — " small Latin and less Greek." 

 The reasons given are poor. Walton could never, 

 says Lowell, " have been taught even the rudiments 

 of Latin," and he gives some instances which he 

 considers carry his point. It is enough for us, he 

 says, " that he contrived to pick up somewhere 

 and somehow a competent mastery of his mother 

 tongue (far harder because seeming easier than 

 Latin) and a diction of persuasive simplicity, 

 capable of dignity where that was natural and 

 becoming, such as not even the Universities can 

 bestow." 



Bethune writes that Walton's "knowledge of 

 Latin, a few scraps of which appear on his 

 pages, was evidently very slight." I suggest he 

 was at least a fair Latin scholar. I do not forget 

 that many of his own quotations from ancient 

 authors might have been supplied to him in 

 translations in English books, which are known 

 to have been in existence in his day.^ And I admit, 

 he says of himself, "when I look back upon 



1 Walton quotes Thucydides in his Life of Sandersonj but a 

 translation of that writer's History of the Grecian War was printed 

 in 1628. 



