IZAAK WALTON AND HIS FRIENDS 85 



whether anyone has ever surmised who the un- 

 known friend was ? It seems very likely it might 

 have been Walton himself/ because we have seen, 

 in Chapter IV., how fond Walton was of scribbling 

 on stones and the like, and we have certainly a 

 right to presume he was present at the funeral 

 himself, and in London the next day. We know 

 he was at Donne's deathbed shortly before he 

 died. The incident was not narrated by Walton 

 until over thirty years after the death of Donne, 

 and it is most improbable, if not impossible, that 

 the Cathedral authorities would have allowed a 

 writing in coal to have remained unobliterated ; 

 and who except the author would have been likely 

 to remember the lines after that lapse of time ? ^ 



Walton never mentions Donne as being an 

 angler. The author of The Anglers Sure Guide, 

 published in 1706, ascribed a book called The 

 Secrets of Angling, by J. D., " to that great Prac- 

 titioner, Master, and Patron of Angling, Dr 

 Donne." The real author was, however, in 1811, 

 clearly shown to have been John Dennys.^ 



1 1 see Mr Gosse, in his Life and Letters of Donne, suggests this : but 

 he gives no reasons. 



^ Walton published his Life of Donne in 1640, but the epitaph in- 

 cident is not narrated in it. It is one of the many additions he made 

 after the first collected edition of the Lives published in 1670, for it 

 appears for the first time in the first collected edition of the Lives re- 

 published in 1675. There is an epitaph on Dr Donne's death worth 

 reading, to be found in Sir John Mennis's Musarum Delicice, Vol. II., 

 commencing, " He that would write an epitaph for me," 



^ The Secrets of Angling was first printed in 1613. 



