46 IZAAK WALTON AND HIS FRIENDS 



The Complete Angler that it will hold its place 

 in our literature "as long as the white-thorn 

 blossoms in the hedgerows, and the lark carols 

 in the cloud." 



We get at the Scotsman's estimate of Walton 

 by reading an article in Blackwood's Magazine for 

 October, 1823, soon after Major's edition of The 

 Complete Angler was brought out. The writer 

 says that Walton was more tenderly beloved in 

 England than in Scotland: "Such a being could 

 never have been in Scotland, and therefore we do 

 not thoroughly understand either his character 

 or the impassioned veneration with which it is 

 regarded. He is rather considered as a sort of 

 oddity ; and the book itself is not so much felt, 

 as the real record of the experience of a flesh and 

 blood old man : as a pleasant, although somewhat 

 unnatural, fiction, too often bordering upon silli- 

 ness ; and to a grave philosophical people like us, 

 throughout tinged with a childish and Utopian 

 spirit." Of course, it was quite impossible that 

 such a book should not have fierce criticism 

 bestowed upon it, and Hazlitt says : " There are 

 those who if you praise Walton's Complete Angler, 

 sneer at it as a childish or old-womanish perform- 

 ance." The greatest by far of Walton's detractors, 

 however, was Richard Franck; this is what he 

 writes : " Isaac Walton (late author of The Compleat 

 Angler) has imposed upon the world this monthly 



