1 6 IZAAK WALTON AND HIS FRIENDS 



must have been one of those referred to in these 

 beautiful lines : — 



" There are in this loud stunning tide 

 Of human care and crime, 

 With whom the melodies abide 



Of th' everlasting chime ; 

 Who carry music in their heart 

 Through dusky lane and wrangling mart, 

 Plying their daily task with busier feet, 

 Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat." 



John Keble, 



This " saint of the mart and busy street " seems 

 by opportunity of leisure to have given his mind 

 to literature, and his free-time to the study and 

 practice of angling. It is indeed difficult to know 

 exactly v^here to place him. He was saturated 

 with religion and with theology from his youth up, 

 and the man who only knows of him as a fisher- 

 man will receive a mighty revelation when he 

 discovers he was a most religious man, as well as 

 a theologian and a literary one, though also "un- 

 doubtedly the best angler with a minnow in 

 England, " if we are to believe Cotton's statement 

 on the point. We may be permitted to wonder 

 where Walton would have found himself in the 

 ecclesiastical world if now alive. No '* peacock" 

 ritualism, as Emerson expresses it, would, we may 

 be sure, have attracted him. The sight of the 

 churches staggering backward to the mummeries 

 of the dark ages would probably have made him 



I 



