•ST. 8s.] LIFE OF IZAAK WALTON. xciii 



postscript to the first edition he says he then wished to have done 

 but was prevented by the manuscript being hastened from him. 

 To the edition of Sanderson's Life whicli was printed in 1678, 

 "Walton added a letter which he had received from Dr Pierce, 

 dated at North Tidworth, 5th March 1678, in which he addressed 

 him as " Good Mr Walton,* on the subject of Sanderson's corre- 

 spondence, and referred him to some materials for his life of that 

 prelate. 



A copy of Bishop Sanderson's Sermons which belonged to 

 Walton is preserved, and was probably the one which is mentioned 

 in his will. In the title-page its original owner has written 

 " Izaak Walton, June 25°, 1658, price 15=." Numerous passages 

 of the celebrated preface to the " Fourteen Sermons " are marked 

 by him, because they expressed opinions similar to his own. 

 Several marginal notes occur, containing the names of the persons 

 to whom Sanderson alluded, and he has copied at length all the 

 texts which are referred to. At the end of the preface to the 

 " Twenty Sermons," Walton has written, " This Preface is an 

 humble and bold challenge to the dissenting brethren of the Clergy 

 of England : And was v?rit by that humble and good man the 

 author, in the times of persecution and dangpr ; " and in his Life 

 of Sanderson he alludes to it in very similar terms.^ 



About the year 1678, Walton determined on publishing a poem 

 entitled " Thealma and Clearchus," a pastoral history " in smooth 

 and easy verse," which had been written many years before by 

 John Chalkhill, Esq., " an acquaintant and friend of Edmund 

 Spencer." Walton's preface is dated on the 7th of May 1678, 

 though the first edition of the poem which has been discovered, 

 was not printed until 1683. The reprint of Thealma and Clearchus 

 in 1820 exhibits an amusing specimen of critical sagacity, as it is 

 therein gravely asserted that " Chalkhill is but a name unappro- 

 priated — a verbal phantom — a shadow of a shade," and the author- 

 ship of the poem is attributed to Walton himself;' whereas an 



life : — ^*tis now too late to wish that mine may be like his : for I am in the eighty-fifth 

 year of my age: and God knows it hath not; but I most humbly beseech Ahnighty 

 God that my death may : and I do as earnestly beg, that if any reader shall receive any 

 satisfaction from this very plain, and as true relation, he will be so charitable as to say 

 Ameti. I. W. 



" Blessed is that man in whose spirit there is no guile. Ps. xxxii. 2." 



8 Ed. Zouch, vol. ii. p. 250. 



9 This hypothesis has been adopted in the Retrospective Review (vol. iv. p. 231), in 

 Majoi's edition of the '* Complete Angler," and was even exaggerated in a long note to 

 an edition of Zouch's Life of Walton, published by Prowett in 1823. Its fallacy was 

 first exposed by the late Archdeacon Nares, in the Gentleman's Magazine, upon the 

 grounds of its extreme improbability, and that such a deception was utterly inconsistent 

 with Walton's character. Mr Nares noticed the monumental inscription to John 



