INTRODUCTION. XXV 



Like the black tulip, its value is the " scarcity value." 

 There is no lack of orally garrulous Pepyses and 

 Boswells, fluent raconteurs with memories of orient 

 richness; how rare, on the contrary, the Pepyses 

 and Boswells who write ! Put but a pen in his hand, 

 and it is a hundred to one that the most ingenuous 

 " agreeable rattle " of club and drawing-room is struck 

 with sterility. 



Considered as a matter of literary form, it is true 

 that Walton's artlessness, his concise simplicity of 

 phrase, is not always as artless as it looks ; and Mr. 

 Lowell has shown that a certain fine line of his l is 

 the chastened result of repetition and experiment. 

 Artistic nicety is not, however, incompatible with 

 candor; Pheidias was more plain-spoken than the 

 rude fashioners of the sexless xoana; and the works 

 of the guileless, amiably discursive Walton form no 

 exception to the rule that the passages in an author 

 which flow easiest are nine times in ten precisely the 

 ones that have received his most careful elaboration. 

 Again, much of Walton's charm is due to a turn, too 

 rarely exercised, for infusing into his own style some- 

 thing of the enchanting quaintness of phrase and 

 fancy of his great contemporaries Jeremy Taylor and 

 Sir Thomas Browne. There are crotchets and turns 

 in the "Lives" and "The Angler" that Browne 

 might have envied and Lamb have echoed ; and in 

 Walton's choicer passages the earmarks with delight 

 that winding, " many-membered " period, fluctuating 

 like the wayward melody of the wind-harp, borne (as 



1 " These hymns are now lost to us, but doubtless they were 

 such as they two now sing in heaven." Life of Herbert. 



