xiv INTRODUCTION. 



Walton, who revered learning, been nourished on a 

 diet of Greek roots and particles, England would 

 perhaps have gained a pedant at the price of a man 

 of original merit and savor, in most cases an un- 

 desirable exchange. Among the trivialities of petti- 

 fogging criticism there is, perhaps, none more abject 

 than this belittling an author of natural gifts and 

 invention on the score of his minor lapses in scholar- 

 ship. Even Shakespeare has been brayed at for 

 such slips as placing a seaport in Bohemia. 



Walton went up to London from Staffordshire 

 sometime before 1619, and, until the date of his re- 

 tirement in 1664 with a modest fortune, he seems to 

 have followed the trade of a linendraper. His first 

 settlement in London as a shopkeeper was at the 

 Royal Exchange in Cornhill ; and the fact that the 

 shops round the Exchange were but seven and a half 

 feet long by five wide has started one of his editors, 

 the fastidious Mr. Major, on the eminently British 

 conjecture that Walton must have been a wholesale 

 dealer, because his shop was too small for the dis- 

 play of goods. This well-meant theory, benevolently 

 devised to disinfect a vulgar occupation, has been 

 properly upset and laughed at by later editors; and 

 it will probably seem of little moment to any one out- 

 side a class treated at some length by Thackeray, 

 whether a man who could write the "Lives" and 

 " The Angler " thought fit to serve his customers by 

 the piece or by the gross. 



Sometime before 1624 Walton left the Exchange, 

 and we find it recorded that " he dwelt on the north 

 side of Fleet Street, in a house two doors west of 

 Chancery Lane, and abutting on a messuage known 



