Xxii INTRODUCTION. 



unmingled perhaps with a little human weakness 

 touching the final sharing of spoils. Fruitful lives 

 like his, too, are not to be played fast and loose with. 

 What had the world lost had Shakespeare fallen in 

 some civil chance-medley of the times, like the 

 Essex brawl, or had rare Ben Jonson been spitted 

 on a Spanish pike in the Low Countries ? 



But not to multiply casuistry here, let us pass on 

 to a point at which Walton is plainly and ludicrously 

 lacking. Oddly enough, it is a point at which he is 

 in some respects strongest, his sympathies. He 

 speaks in the most tenderly caressing way of "the 

 little living creatures with which the sun and sum- 

 mer adorn and beautify the river-banks and mead- 

 ows ; " he is loath even to disturb at its sweet labor 

 " the little contemptible winged creature, namely, the 

 laborious bee ; " he is as tender as Chaucer is of the 

 blackbird and thrassel, the titlark, the little linnet, 

 and "the honest robin that loves mankind both 

 alive and dead ; " in short, the sunny heart of Wal- 

 ton has a ray of kindness for all God's humbler crea- 

 tures, except the fish. Here he is adamant. An 

 angler, he tells us, does no harm but to the fish, and 

 incidentally, of course, to the thousand and one luck- 

 less beings he baits his hook with ; but this he counts 

 as nothing. We have searched his pages in vain for 

 a single expression of regret for the (from the fishes' 

 point of view) devilish tortures he incites his disci- 

 ples to inflict. Once we fancied we saw a ray of 

 hope; but it soon vanished: after describing to his 

 " loving scholar " the proper mode of putting a frog 

 upon the hook, he deceptively adds: "and in so 

 doing, use him as though you loved him, that is. 



