96 THOMAS KEN AND IZAAK WALTON 



"TO MY APPROVED AND MUCH RESPECTED 



FRIEND Iz. WA. 



" To thee, thou more than thrice beloved friend, 



I, too unworthy of so great a bliss, 

 These harsh-tuned lines I here to thee commend, 



Thou being cause it is now as it is, 

 For had'st thou held thy tongue, by silence might 

 These have been buried in oblivious night. 



" If they were pleasing, I would call them thine, 



And disavow my title to the verse, 

 But being bad, I needs must call them mine. 



No ill thing can be clothed in thy verse. 

 Accept them, then, and where I have offended, 

 Rase thou it out, and let it be amended." 



(S.P.) 



The initials S. P. were supposed by Collier and 

 others to be those of Samuel Purchase, author of 

 " The Pilgrimage " ; but the D. N. B. sufficiently 

 proves that S. P. was Samuel Page, Vicar of 

 Deptford, and that he dedicated his work, " The 

 Love of Amos and Laura" (the edition of 1619), 

 to Walton. This was reprinted by Dr. Grosart in 

 1879. The original edition of this poem was pub- 

 lished in 1613, but in the only known copy of this 

 first edition of that work, which is imperfect, the 

 above lines do not appear (they may have been 

 torn out). At that time Walton was only twenty, 

 and at that early age, while he was still an apprentice 



