BIBLIOGRAPHICAL PREFACE. Ixiii 



Plures necat Gula quam Gladius ;" a new edition of which 

 was published at Edinburgh in 1821, with preface and 

 notes, by Walter Scott, who does not append his name, 

 but signs himself, 



«* No Fisher, 

 But a well-wisher 

 To the game." 



From his excellent antiquarian authority we learn that 

 Franck was a Cromwellian Trooper, and an Independent, 

 though upon a mystical system of his own, who, for some 

 time after the Restoration, had found refuge in America, 

 as he published a " Philosophical Treatise of the Ori- 

 ginal and Production of Things, writ in America in a Time 

 of Solitude," the head title of which was " Rabbi Moses." 

 He was born, and for a great part of his life lived, at Cam- 

 bridge, and speaks of himself as a person of slender 

 education, though one would think (with Scott) that "some 

 degree of learning was necessary to have formed so very 

 uncommon and pedantic a style." We have taken thus 

 much notice of him because he enjoys the bad notoriety 

 of being the only author who has spoken unkindly of the 

 kindly Walton,* and also because he certainly proves 



but in Pickering's Ellis Catalogue there is a worse error, in the statement 

 that he was a Captain in the Royal army, which is sufficiently refuted by 

 Scott, and indeed by the book itself. 



* xhere is another exception, Lord Byron, who, in the thirteenth canto 

 of Don Juan, says of Walton, 



" The quaint old coxcomb in his gullet 

 Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it;" 



and then in a note calls him " a sentimental savage," and angling " the 

 cursedest, coldest, and the stupidest of sports," and adds, that " no angler 

 can be a good man," though he makes an exception in favor of " one of the 

 best men he ever knew ; as humane, delicate-minded, generous, and ex- 

 cellent a creature as any in the world, who was an angler : true, he angled 



