Introduction 



It is inevitable that such a type has its limitations. It is apt to be 

 hard on merely human feelings, and one encounters Walton's limita- 

 tions when he comes to deal with such a matter as Donne's beautiful 

 passionate love-story. Donne's wife married him against the open 

 hostility of her family, and their life together to the very end 

 (even when she had become the mother of twelve children) was an 

 idyl of devoted love yet Walton declares their marriage to have 

 been " the remarkable error " of Donne's life, and even goes so far 

 as to say, " a marriage, too, without the allowance of those friends, 

 whose approbation always was, and ever will be, necessary, to make 

 even a virtuous love become lawful " ! One would have expected 

 the gentle fisherman to have treated so charming a love-story more 

 tenderly, but I am afraid " Honest Izaak's " view of woman was 

 much like that of Mr. Coventry Patmore, and his respect for social 

 usage and dividing-lines as inexorable. 



But a saint is, of necessity, somewhat inhuman, and Izaak, being 

 a true saint, he was not, doubtless, without saintly drawbacks 

 though they are hard to discover. To adapt Wordsworth's sonnet, 

 he was a saint who wrote with a quill "dropt from an angel's 

 wing." One can hardly think of one so innocent-minded writing 

 so well. There always seems a spice of the devil in any form of 

 skill, and we don't readily think of the good man being clever as 

 well. It seems a sort of wickedness in him, somehow. But perhaps 

 Walton was not quite so artless in this matter as he seemed. No 

 artist can be really artless. Take, for instance, that apparently 

 simple sentence in the life of Herbert, where, speaking of certain of 

 Donne's hymns, he says, "These hymns are now lost to us ; but 

 doubtless they were such as they two now sing in heaven." How 

 touchingly quaint, we say, how primitive in its old-world innocency ! 

 And yet Lowell has pointed out, that on the inside of his Eusebius, 

 preserved at Salisbury, Walton has written three attempts at this 

 sentence, each of them very far from the concise beauty to which he 

 at last constrained himself. In his prayer-book are to be found his 

 studies for his wife's epitaph, and his account of the death of Hooker 

 and the Lives generally received considerable retouching. We have 

 seen him working at The Compleat Angler till the last ; and if it was 



Ixix 



