10 LIFE OP WALTON. 



deprived, and died in retirement. Walton seems tor 

 have been as happy in the married state, as the society 

 fcnd friendship of a prudent and pious woman of great 

 endowments could make him; and that Mrs. Walton 

 was such a one, we may conclude from what will be said 

 of her hereafter. 



- About 1643 he left London, and with a fortune very 

 far short of what would now be called a competency *, 

 seems to have retired altogether from business ; at 

 which time (to use the words of Wood) '* finding it 

 " dangerous for honest men to be there, he left that city, 

 c and lived sometimes at Stafford t, and elsewhere ; 

 u but mostly in the families of the eminent clergymen 

 " of England, of whom he was much beloved J. 



While he continued in London, his favourite recrea- 

 tion was angling, in which he was the greatest profi- 

 cient of his time ; and indeed, so great were his skill 

 and experience in that art, that there is scarce any 

 writer on the subject since his time, who has not made 

 the rules and practice of Walton his very foundation* 

 It is therefore with the greatest propriety, that Lang- 

 baine calls him, " the common father of all anglers ." 



The river that he seems mostly to have frequented for 

 this purpose, was the Lea, which has its source above 

 Ware in Hertfordshire, and falls into the Thames a 

 little below Black Wall |h unless we will suppose that 

 the vicinity of the New River H to the place of his ha- 

 bitation, might sometimes tempt him out with his 

 friends, honest Nat. and R. Roe, whose loss he so 

 pathetically mentions**, to spend an afternoon there. 



In the year Ij662, he was by death deprived of the 

 solace and comfort of a good wife, as appears by th& 



* See his Will, at the end of the Life. > 



f He retired to a small estate in Staffordshire, not far from the town of 

 Stafford. His loyalty made him obnoxious to the ruling powers ; and we 

 are assured by himself, in his Life of Sanderson, that he was a, sufferer i 

 the civil wars. Zoucb. 



\ Alien. Oxon. Vol. I. 305. 



Lives of the English Dramatic poets. Art. Cla, Coiton r Esq. 



(| See page 3 17, n. 



5 That great work, the bringing water from Chadwell and Amwell, 

 in Hertfordshire, to London, by means of the trench called the New Ri- 

 ver, was completed on Michaelmas day,l 61 3. Stow'sSrvo'F1.1633,p.i2. 



** Preface to Complete Angler* 



