HISTORY OF STAFFORDSHIRE. [269 



as he could meet with ; yet some of the authors whom he quotes, 

 we believe, have never been translated. 



There has not been a writer who has had occasion to make men- 

 tion of the art of angling, since Walton's time, that has not referred 

 to The Complete Angler, as of undoubted authority on the subject; 

 and it has been read, even as a parlour companion, by men of taste, 

 both at home and abroad. 



About two years after the Restoration, Walton wrote the Life of 

 Mr. Richard Hooker, long known by the honourable, and in many 

 respects deserved, appellation of " Judicious." This life of Hooker 

 appears to have been written with great care and faithfulness. It 

 is the life of one of the most learned and excellent men of his age 

 the author of a book which has placed a large portion of what are 

 usually called religious people in such a situation as to render it 

 almost criminal in them to dissent from the church establishment of 

 this country till they have carefully read it through, and seriously 

 weighed its reasonings. 



In 1670 he published The Life of Mr. George Herbert, brother 

 to the celebrated Lord Herbert, of Cherbury, in Shropshire. That 

 part of " The Complete Angler" which treats of fly-fishing, was 

 chiefly communicated by Mr. Thomas Barker, an ingenious and 

 highly facetious person, and a very expert angler. 



In his eighty-third year, a period when, to use his own words, he 

 might have claimed " a writ of ease," he undertook the Life of 

 Bishop Sanderson. The concluding paragraph of this book has 

 been particularly noticed by Dr. Johnson as a specimen of nervous 

 sentiment and pious simplicity. This paragraph informs us, that 

 Walton was then in the eighty-fifth year of his age. Besides these 

 books, for which the memory of Walton will ever be venerated and 

 esteemed, he was somewhat of a poet ; but in this department of 

 literature he did not excel. He collected materials for some other 

 lives, but did not live to finish them; yet in his ninetieth year he 

 published " Thealma and Clearchus, a pastoral history, written long 

 since by John Chalkhil, Esq, an acquaintance and friend of Ed- 

 mund Spenser." To this he wrote a preface, containing a charac- 

 ter of the author. He lived but a short time after this. He died 

 on the 15th of December 1683, during the great frost, at Winches- 

 ter, in the cathedral church of which a large black flat marble stone, 

 with a miserable poetic epitaph, marks the place of his interment. 

 Such was the life of this excellent man; and such the useful nature 

 of his studies and labours. As a biographer he will always be res- 



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