brass band, when there is a certificated eye at every keyhole, and when the Public Informer has become so essential a minister to the general comfort that the world cannot go about its business of a morning till its intellectual appetite is appeased with the latest doings and sayings of John Doe and Richard Roe, there is healing in the gentlemanlike reserves of the past, a benign sense of seclusion, a comfort such as loved hands bring to fevered brows, in the thought of one who, like Walton, has been safe for two hundred years in the impregnable stronghold of the grave. Malice domestic, treason, interviews, nothing can touch him further. The sanctities of his life, at least, cannot be hawked about the streets or capitalized in posters as a whet to the latest edition of the Peeping Tom. If it be the triumph of an historian to make the great highways of the olden time populous and noisy, or even vulgar, with their old life again, it is nevertheless a consolation that we may still find by-paths there, dumb as those through a pine forest, sacred to meditation and to grateful thoughts.

Such a by-path is the life of Walton. Though it lead us through nearly a hundred years of history, many of them stormy with civil or anxious with foreign war, the clamor of events is seldom importunate, and the petulant drums are muffled with a dreamy remoteness. So far as he himself could shape its course, it leads us under the shadow of honeysuckle hedges, or along the rushy banks of silence-loving streams, or through the claustral hush of cathedral closes, or where the shadow of the vil

lage church-tower creeps round its dial of green graves below, or to the company of thoughtful and godly men. He realized the maxim which Voltaire preached, but so assiduously avoided practising, bene vixit qui bene latuit. He did his best to fulfil the apostle's injunction in studying to be quiet. Whether such fugitive and cloistered virtue as his come within the sweep of Milton's gravely cadenced lash or not, whether a man do not owe himself more to the distasteful publicity of active citizenship than to the petting of his own private tastes or talents, as Walton thought it right and found it sweet to do, may be a question. There can be none that the contemplation of such a life both soothes and charms, and we sigh to think that the like of it is possible no longer. Where now would the fugitive from the espials of our modern life find a sanctuary which telegraph or telephone had not deflowered? I do not mean that Walton was an idle man, who, as time was given him for nothing, thought that he might part with it for nothing too. If he had been, I should not be writing this. He left behind him two books, each a masterpiece in its own simple and sincere way, and only the contemplative leisure of a life like his could have secreted the precious qualities that assure them against decay.

But Walton's life touches the imagination at more points than this of its quietude and inwardness. It opens many windows to the fancy. Its opportunities were as remarkable as its length. Twentytwo years old when Shakespeare died, he lived long enough to have read Dryden's "Absalom and

Achitophel." He had known Ben Jonson and Chillingworth and Drayton and Fuller; he had exchanged gossip with Antony à Wood; he was the friend of Donne and Wotton and King; he had seen George Herbert; and how many more sons of Memory must he not have known or seen in all those years so populous with men justly famous! Of the outward husk of this life of his we know comfortably little, but of the kernel much, and that chiefly from such unconscious glimpses as he himself has given us.

Of

Isaac, or (as he preferred to spell the name) Izaak, Walton was born at Stafford, on the 9th of August, 1593, of a family in the rank of substantial yeomen long established in Staffordshire. his mother not even the name is known, and of his father we know only that his baptismal name was Jervis, and that he was buried on the 11th of Feb

ruary, 1596-97. Surely the short and simple annals of the poor have been seldom more laconic than this. Sir Harris Nicolas, author of the first trustworthy Life of Walton, yielding for once to the biographer's weakness for appearances, says that he "received a good, though not, strictly speaking, classical education." Considering that absolutely nothing is known of Walton's schooling, the concession to historical conscientiousness made in the parenthetic "strictly speaking" is amusing. We have the witness of documents in Walton's own handwriting that he could never have been taught even the rudiments of Latin; for he spells the third person singular of the perfect tense of

obire, obiet, separate, seperate, and divided, devided. And these documents are printed by Sir Harris himself. After this one finds it hard to conceive what a classical education, loosely speaking, would be. In the list of Walton's books there is none that is not in English. It is enough for us that he contrived to pick up somewhere and somehow a competent mastery of his mother-tongue (far harder because seeming easier than Latin), and a diction of persuasive simplicity, capable of dignity where that was natural and becoming, such as not even the universities can bestow.

It is not known in what year he went to London. It has been conjectured, and with much probability, that he was sent thither to serve his apprenticeship with a relative, Henry Walton, a haberdasher. Of this Henry Walton nothing is known beyond what we are told by his will, and this shows us that he had connections with Staffordshire. That Izaak Walton gave the name of Henry to two sons in succession seems to show some kind of close relation between them and some earlier Henry. But Mr. Nicholls discovered in the records of the Ironmongers' Company for 1617-18 the following entry: "Isaac Walton was made one of the Ironmongers' Company by Thomas Grinsell, citizen and ironmonger." That Walton had relatives of this name appears from a legacy in his will to the widow of his "Cosen Grinsell." On the whole, whatever light is let in by this chink serves only to make the abundant darkness more visible. May there not have been another Isaac, perhaps a cousin, to dis

tinguish himself from whom ours gave to his surname its fantastic spelling? What is certain is that he was already in London in 1619. In that year was published the second edition of a poem, "The Love of Amos and Laura," which, to judge by all that I know of it, the dedication, must happily have been very soon gathered to its fathers; but it has two points of interest. It is dedicated to Walton by a certain S. P., who may have been the Samuel Purchas of the "Pilgrims;" and in this dedication there are expressions which show that Walton's character was already, in his twentysixth year, marked by the same attractiveness and purity and the same aptness for friendship which endeared him in later life to so many good and eminent men. S. P., after calling him his "more than thrice-beloved friend," tells him that he is the cause that the poem "is now as it is," and that it might have been called his had it been better, but that "No ill thing can be clothed with thy verse. We should infer that Walton had done much in the way of revision, and not only this, but that he was already known, among his friends at least, as a writer of verse himself. It is puzzling, however, that the first edition was published in 1613, when Walton was barely twenty, and that the second differs from the first in a single word only. In the only known copy of this earlier edition (which, to be sure, is otherwise imperfect) the dedication is not to be found. Sir Harris Nicolas suggests that Walton may have revised the poem in manuscript, but it seems altogether unlikely that he