INTRODUCTION. XV11 



Walton occasionally suffered for his loyalty to Church 

 and King, we have some hints in his " Life of Sander- 

 son." That a good share of his leisure was spent 

 with his friend and adopted son, Charles Cotton, a 

 good poet, a cheerful man, and an angler scarcely 

 second to Walton himself, there is no doubt. Cotton 

 was a royalist country-gentleman of Beresford in 

 Staffordshire, whose handsome estate, Mr. Lowell 

 thinks, "after sidling safely through the intricacies 

 of the civil war, trickled pleasantly away through 

 the chinks of its master's profusion." He had built 

 a little fishing-house, marked with his own and 

 Walton's initials " twisted in cypher," on the banks 

 of the Dove ; and the two friends must have spent 

 many a pleasant morning together whipping the 

 waters of the stream, and conversing of the authors 

 they knew so well. 



Of the efficacy of the "most honest, ingenious, 

 quiet, and harmless art of angling " in preserving the 

 sound mind in the sound body, he himself was a liv- 

 ing proof. He assures us in his will, written by him- 

 self at near ninety, that he is " in perfect memory ; " 

 and we find him at eighty-three planning a pilgrimage 

 of more than a hundred miles a serious matter at 

 that day to join his friend Cotton in fishing in the 

 Dove. 



Walton died on the fifteenth day of December, 

 1683, in his ninetieth year, at Winchester, and lies 

 buried in a chapel in the south aisle of the cathedral. 

 The verses to his memory, inscribed on a large flat 

 slab of black marble, are so far from being what he 

 would term "choicely good" that we refrain from 

 quoting them. 



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