Ixxiv BIBLIOGRAPHICAL PREFACE. 



have imitated, indeed, all of any account who have written 

 on the same subject except Bowlker and Salter, whose 

 works are merely practical. As his first editor, Moses 

 Browne, himself an honest angler, says : " Nothing can 

 be drawn more in character ; the honest man, the plain, 

 good-natured, inoffensive angler is conversing whh you in 

 every line ; withal there is a modesty so winning, through 

 the whole ; in a rich store of learning, it expresses, under 

 a designed and studied concealment ; that I question if its 

 equal is to be met with in any book with so unpromising a 

 title, and that gives no expectation, from its subject, of 

 such an entertainment, that has been written in our own 



or any language There was scarce a man living 



that ever received more public attestations of familiar 

 love and esteem than Mr. Walton, from men of birth and 

 learning ; chiefly on account of that pleasing sweetness of 

 nature and conversation, innate simplicity of manners, and, 

 above all, his religious integrity and undissembled honesty 

 of heart, for which he was so remarked and endeared to 

 all that ever knew him. They sat so naturally on him, 

 you may trace them in everything he writ ; he drew his 

 own picture in every line ; I think there are hardly any 

 writings ever showed more the features and limbs, the 

 very spirit and heart of an author. These virtues seemed 

 inwrought with his very frame, and gave him the name, 

 with posterity, of a Nathaniel (like whom it might be said 

 of him, and of none, perhaps, more justly) ' in w^hom there 

 was no guile.' " (Preface to 6th edition.) 



But I forbear, as there would be no end to quotations 

 from the writings of the best authors and the best men 



to have been the same in Mr. Walton as that of Poetry was in Homer. The 

 Improvements that are made by the Generality o^ Inter writers, are indeed 

 so few, and for the most jjart so trivial, rather adding to and perplexing 

 his Words, like the Commentators on a Greek Poet, than either clearing 

 up or enlarging his Sense, that I could not but wonder at seeing so much 

 done to little PMrpose." — British Anf^ler. J. WiUinmson, Gent.. 1740, 



I 



