XX INTRODUCTION. 



John Chalkhill, whose not very important identity has 

 been the theme of much learned discussion. 



Walton's life, stretching over nearly a century, 

 from the golden days when Shakespeare, Jonson, 

 Massinger, and the rest of the Elizabethan "singing- 

 birds" nested in the Mermaid, to the soberer era 

 when Dryden swayed the sceptre of taste and letters 

 at Will's coffee-house, opens many vistas to the 

 fancy, It saw, in its quiet course, the imperious 

 drama of Elizabeth's reign dwindle to its sorry con- 

 clusion, the peevish, sick-room tyranny of a dying 

 old woman, reft of her arrogant illusions, doubtful 

 at last even of her own charms, sans friends, sans 

 flatterers, a sapless kernel shrivelling away from its 

 gilded court-husk ; it saw the fall of Bacon, Strafford, 

 and Laud, the rise of Pym, Hampden, and Crom- 

 well; it heard the clash of pike and rapier at Edge- 

 hill and Marston Moor, and saw the standard that 

 was raised at Nottingham go down in blood at 

 Naseby ; it saw the laurels won for England under 

 the Protectorate fade after the Restoration, and 

 heard the thunder of the Dutch cannon in the Med- 

 way, an ominous alarum that, as Pepys says, made 

 " everybody nowadays reflect upon Oliver and com- 

 mend him." 



Owing to a method of writing history now some- 

 what discredited, it is events and characters like 

 these that stir the fancy when we recall the England 

 of Walton's date. The past has been so strained of 

 its prose by the sieves of historians jealous for "the 

 dignity of history," that we scarcely realize that, 

 after all, it is the outwardly humdrum fortunes of 

 Hodge and his kindred that form the weft and the 



