COTTON AND HIS CONTEMPOEARIES. 63 



to cast his thoughts in some other mould than 

 the dialogue. For assuredly dialogue is at once 

 the most difficult of all literary forms, and also 

 the most dangerous, for its apparent simplicity 

 lures the unskilled to his irretrievable disaster. 

 Charles Lamb was right, as he usually is in 

 literary judgments, when he said that Walton's 

 book is the only treatise written in dialogue 

 which is worth a halfpenny, for in him every- 

 thing is alive, whereas in others the interlocu- 

 tors are merely abstract arguments personified. 

 And no one who has sighed over the manner in 

 which countless writers have used Walton's 

 name as a meaningless tag or as a peg on which 

 to hang dull disquisitions or borrowed reflec- 

 tions, or have felt it necessary to present their 

 experiences in a shape which though suitable to 

 Walton in the seventeenth century is utterly in- 

 appropriate to another writer in another age, 

 but must have impiously wished that he had 

 possessed a style less individual and a point of 

 view less dangerous to copy. This much, at 

 any rate, is certain, that many writers on fish- 

 ing would have produced better books if they 

 had not tried to copy him, but had written in 

 their own everyday style. Indeed it is not too 

 much to say, though it sounds blasphemy, that 

 the more a book refers to Walton, the worse 

 book it is. Walton is thereby most unjustly 

 discredited, and his name gets associated with 

 sham archaism, tiresome periphrasis, and 

 irrelevant sentiment. If there are any who 



