Introduction 



really the first of the book as we know it to-day, and that perhaps 

 accounts for its greater rarity, for Walton had increased its length 

 by at least a third, and made many changes and additions. In the first 

 edition the interlocutors had been but two, " Piscator " and 

 " Viator," and in the second they are three, as we know them, 

 " Venator " taking the place of " Viator," whom, however, Cotton 

 resuscitates in his second part. In some respects Walton would 

 have done well to allow his book to remain in the form it had now 

 attained, for I must agree with Sir Harris Nicolas that the changes 

 and additions made in the fifth edition (the third and fourth having 

 practically been reprints of the second) were somewhat short of 

 improvements. " The garrulity and sentiments," says Nicolas, " of 

 an octogenarian are very apparent in some of the alterations ; and 

 the subdued colouring of religious feeling which prevails throughout 

 the former editions, and forms one of the charms of the piece, is, in 

 this impression, so much heightened as to become almost obtrusive ; " 

 and he gives as an example the homiletical passage in the last 

 chapter, immediately after Venator's recipe for colouring rods, 

 which, he says truly, is in fact a religious essay. In this fifth edition 

 also he made the artistic mistake of inviting Cotton to write an 

 unnecessary second part, but it was so he decreed that his book should 

 take its final shape, and it is on this fifth edition that all subsequent 

 editions have been based. To some copies of this edition still a 

 third part was added, namely The Experienced Angler, or Angling 

 Improved, by Colonel Richard Venables, a letter from Walton to 

 whom will be found in the Appendix. When including this third 

 part, the book is entitled The Universal Angler, but Venables's 

 portion was not retained in later editions. Of these the most impor- 

 tant have been those of Moses Browne, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Harris 

 Nicolas, John Major, Dr. Bethune, and Mr. R. B. Marston. Sir 

 Harris Nicolas's is the most complete, and will probably remain the 

 authoritative edition, John Major's is the daintiest (but greatly 

 marred by its shopkeeper's preface), and Dr. Bethune's is the most 

 learned. 



Perhaps no English book except The Pilgrim s ^Progress and 

 Robinson Crusoe has been so beloved. Generation after generation 



Ixii 



