INTRODUCTION. xill 



has been in some sort a prey to modern journalistic 

 espials. 



Walton was born of a family of substantial yeo- 

 men at Stafford, on the- 9th of August, 1593, the 

 year of Marlowe's death, and twenty-two years be- 

 fore Shakespeare's. Of his family we know next to 

 nothing, minute research having developed little 

 more than the rather spectral fact that his father, 

 Jervis Walton, was probably the second son of 

 George Walton, sometime bailiff of Yoxhall. Of his 

 school days there is no record. One fancies, how- 

 ever, that Izaak found the "contemplative man's 

 recreation" more to his taste than the Classics; as 

 his writings testify that he had little Latin and no 

 Greek, his frequent quotations of authors who 

 wrote only in Latin, as Gesner, Cardan, Aldrovandus, 

 Rondeletius, and Albertus Magnus, being derived 

 from Topsel's translation of Gesner, in whose vo- 

 luminous history of animals the other writers are 

 cited. His educational defects, except in the clas- 

 sics, were in a measure supplied by later reading, 

 and especially by familiar converse with eminent and 

 learned divines of his day, of whom, says the Ox- 

 ford antiquary, Anthony a- Wood, "he was much 

 beloved." 



Some of Walton's critics have thought fit to sneer at, 

 others, scarcely wiser, to gloss over, his imperfect at- 

 tainments, and especially his defective Latinity. A 

 lack of acquirements which are the indispensable prop 

 and stay of mediocrity need not, however, detain us 

 in the case of a man of real parts and performance. 

 The learning of a Person or an Erasmus would never 

 have produced "The Complete Angler;" and had 



