xviii LIFE OF IZAAK WALTON. [1597, 



fact can be stated respecting him from the time of his baptism, 

 until he attained his twentieth year, when he appears to have been 

 a resident of London. Neither the cause nor the period of his 

 removal from Stafford to the metropolis has been ascertained ; 

 though it is probable that he was apprenticed, when very young, 

 to a distant relation of the name of Henry Walton, who was 

 haberdasher at Whitechapel.* 



The earliest notice 5 of Walton after his birth is of a very inter- 



* This conjecture is principally founded on the following facts. It is well known that 

 Izaak Walton followed the trade of a sempster or haberdasher. Henry Walton, " citizen 

 and haberdasher, of Whitechapel," is so described in the will of his cousin Samuel Walton, 

 of St Mary's, Cray, in Kent, gentleman, son of Henry Walton, citizen and cloth-worker, 

 of London, dated on the 2d, and proved on the gth of April 1631 ; and his connection 

 with the county of Stafford is shown by the testator's mentioning his uncle John Walton, 

 of Mathfield, in that county, who may have been the father of the said Henry Walton, 

 of Whitechapel. An abstract of Henry Walton's will is inserted in Note L in the 

 Appendix, where other reasons are stated for thinking the hypothesis correct. The 

 records of the Haberdashers' Company do not contain the names of Henry or Izaak 

 Walton between 1600 and 1630. Sir John Hawkins supposes that Walton first settled 

 in London as a shopkeeper in the Royal Exchange, under the patronage of Sir Thomas 

 Gresham, but his opinion has been shown to be erroneous. See Anthony Wood, Athen. 

 Oxon. ed. Bliss. I. 698. 



* It is necessary to advert to an article which appeared in a weekly publication called 

 The Freebooter, on the i8th of October 1823, where it is stated that " there is a 

 manuscript in the Lansdowne Collection of the British Museum, which throws some 

 light upon the early life of Izaak Walton. By whom it was written, and at what precise 

 date, does not appear ; but the handwriting is evidently of about the time of the Revolu- 

 tion, and in it the author speaks of Walton as ' not long since deceased, to the great grief 

 of all his loving friends." " 



The MS., it is said, refers very much to the interval between his birth in 1593 and 

 1624 : " it fixes the place of his education at Stafford, where he was born, and from 

 whence he removed to London, where he was regularly apprenticed to one Holmes, a 

 sempster, with whom he lived until he was twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Sir 

 J. Hawkins conjectures that he married about 1632, but on what ground it is difficult to 

 discover : now the author of this MS. asserts that Walton ' took a wife ' before he was 

 twenty-four years old, and while he held a shop near the Exchange. The date of his 

 removal into Fleet Street is not supplied with precision, but it is clear that ic was at least 

 as early as 1618, and after his marriage ; but the document is written in a rough, sketchy 

 style, and consists generally rather of biographical hints and anecdotes than of regular 

 details of events relating to any of the persons mentioned in the volume, of which the 

 notice of Walton forms a very small part." " The author of the MS. speaks of Walton 

 as a very sweet poet in his youth, and more than all in matters of love." 



In consequence of this statement considerable trouble has been taken to discover the 

 MS. alluded to ; but no trace of it can be found in the British Museum ; and it is pre- 

 sumed that the article is a mere fiction. No reference is given to the volume in which 

 it is said to occur ; and if such an interesting account of Walton really existed in a 

 collection so well known and so fully catalogued as the Lansdowne MSS., it is impos- 

 sible to suppose that it would not long since have been brought to light ; or that it would 

 have escaped the particular search which has been recently made for it. Be this 

 however as it may, little reliance could be placed on the article, even if it were genuine, 

 because one of the few facts stated in it can be disproved, as it is said that Walton 

 married before he was twenty-four years of age, whereas his marriage took place in 

 December 1626, when he was about thirty-three ; and there is not the slightest cause to 

 suppose that he had a former wife. But the article in question is not the only doubtful 

 statement which has been published respecting Walton : his residence in the Royal 

 Exchange; his retirement in 1643 to a cottage in Staffordshire, where Dr Morley is said 

 to have found an asylum ; and his having written the epitaph of an old servant called 

 "David Hookhaml" (a name very appropriately chosen for the purpose), who died in 

 1647, aetat. 63 (vide Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. C. part II. p. 206), are equally 

 apocryphal. 



