Introduction 



the placidly believing author of the Lives and the translator of him 

 who created the essay." 



But saint and sinner have been friends before and after Walton 

 and Cotton, and the likeableness of a friend is more important to a 

 friendship than his opinions, or even his morals. Besides, if Walton 

 was a saint, he had plainly not forgotten the good gospel advice 

 given to unpractical children of light, and Lowell no doubt indicates 

 one bond between him and Cotton, when he says that " Walton 

 loved a gentleman of the blood as honestly as Johnson did, and was, 

 I am sure, as sturdily independent withal .... himself of obscurest 

 lineage, there was nothing he relished more keenly than the long 

 pedigrees of other people." When that gentleman of the blood was 

 an angler, with one of the best trout streams in England rippling 

 through his lands, a man of taste, a staunch cavalier, a loyal Churchman, 

 and a kind, hearty, good-natured young man, reverent to age and 

 respectful towards sanctities, if perhaps a thought too gay and giddy in 

 his life and poems, as young men will be well, why shouldn't even 

 the Bishop of Chichester's " Honest Izaak," take him for his friend ? 



For Cotton Walton probably had that charm of antithesis which 

 is so attractive to men of the world, who by a sort of intellectual 

 urbanity often understand and interpret goodness and purity better 

 than the good and pure themselves. Probably he had the man 

 of the world's delight in character for its own sake, independent 

 of the particular type's likeness or unlikeness to himself. There 

 must have been times when, mentally, Walton made him yawn 

 tremendously ; times when he would smother his smiles at the old 

 man's prudishness ; times even when he may have been tempted to 

 "damn" his sententiousness. The same happens with Walton's 

 readers to this day, but they go on loving him all the same ; and so 

 it was, no doubt, with Cotton. 



Besides, it must not be forgotten that Walton had been a friend 

 of the father before the son,* a father so closely repeated in the son, 



* In Cotton's poem to Walton quoted in the appendix, he says, a propos of the 

 lives of Donne and Wotton : 



How happy was my father, then, to see 

 Those men he lov'd, by him he lov'd, to be 

 Rescued from frailties and mortality. 

 Ixxiii 



