happiness out of the cheap material that is within the means of the poorest of us. The good fairy gave them to weave cloth of gold out of straw. They did not waste their time or strive to show their cleverness in discussing whether life were worth living, but found every precious moment of it so without seeking, or made it so without grimace, and with no thought that they were doing anything worth remark. Both these books are preeminently cheerful books, and have the invaluable secret of distilling sunshine out of leaden skies. They are companionable books, that tempt us outof-doors and keep us there. The reader of the "Angler" especially finds himself growing conscious of one meaning in the sixth Beatitude too often overlooked, that the pure in heart shall see God, not only in some future and far-off sense, but wherever they turn their eyes.

I have hesitated to say that Walton had style, because, though that quality, the handmaid of talent and the helpmeet of genius, have left the unobtrusive traces of its deft hand in certain choicer parts of Walton's writing, - his guest-chambers as it were, — yet it does by no means pervade and regulate the whole. For in a book we feel the influence of style everywhere, though we never catch it at its work, as in a house we divine the neat-handed ministry of woman. Walton too often leaves his sentences in a clutter. But there are other qualities which, if they do not satisfy like style, are yet even more agreeable, draw us nearer to an author, and make us happier in him. Why try to discover

what the charm of a book is, if only it charm? If I must seek a word that more than any other explains the pleasure which Walton's way of writing gives us, I should say it was its innocency. It refreshes like the society of children. I do not know whether he had humor, but there are passages that suggest it, as where, after quoting Montaigne's delightful description of how he played with his cat, he goes on: "Thus freely speaks Montaigne concerning cats," as if he had taken an undue liberty with them; or where he makes a meteorologist of the crab, that "at a certain age gets into a dead fish's shell, and like a hermit dwells there alone studying the wind and weather;" or where he tells us of the palmer-worm, that "he will boldly and disorderly wander up and down, and not endure to be kept to a diet or fixed to a particular place.' And what he says of Sanderson-that "he did put on some faint purposes to marry"-would have arrided Lamb. These, if he meant to be droll, have that seeming inadvertence which gives its highest zest to humor and makes the eye twinkle with furtive connivance. Walton's weaknesses, too, must be reckoned among his other attractions. He praises a meditative life, and with evident sincerity; but we feel that he liked nothing so well as good talk. His credulity leaves front and back door invitingly open. For this I rather praise than censure him, since it brought him the chance of a miracle at any odd moment, and this complacency of belief was but a lower form of the same quality of mind that in more serious questions gave him his

equanimity of faith. And how persuasively beautiful that equanimity is! Heaven was always as real to him as to us are countries we have seen only in the map, and so near that he caught wafts of the singing there when the wind was in the right quarter. I must not forget Walton's singular and genuine love of Nature and his poetical sympathy with it, less common then than now when "all have got the seed." This love was not in the Ercles vein such as is now in fashion, but tender and true, and expresses itself not deliberately but in caressing ejaculations, as where he speaks of "the little living creatures with which the sun and summer adorn and beautify the river-banks and meadows. whose life, they say, Nature intended not to exceed an hour, and yet that life is made shorter by other flies or by accident." What far-reaching pity in this concluding sigh, and how keen a sense of the sweetness of life, too! In one respect, I think, he is peculiar, his sensitiveness to odors. In enumerating the recreations of man, he reckons sweet smells among them. It is Venator who says this, to be sure; but in the "Angler" there is absolutely no dramatic sense, and it is always Walton who speaks. A part of our entertainment, indeed, is to see him doubling so many parts and all the while so unmistakably himself.

Walton certainly cannot be called original in the sense that he opened new paths to thought or new vistas to imagination. Such men are rare, but almost as rare are those who have force enough of nature to suffuse whatever they write with their own

individuality and to make a thought fresh again and their own by the addition of this indefinable supplement. This constitutes literary originality, and this Walton had. Whatever entered his mind or memory came forth again plus Izaak Walton. We have borrowed of the Latin mythology the word "genius" to express certain intellectual powers or aptitudes which we are puzzled to define, so elusive are they. I have already admitted that this term in its ordinary acceptation cannot be applied to Walton. This would imply larger "draughts of intellectual day" than his ever were or could be. For we ordinarily confine it to a single species of power, which seems sometimes (as in Villon, Marlowe, and Poe) wholly dissociated from the rest of the man, and continues to haunt the ruins of him with its superior presence as if it were rather a genius loci than the natale comes qui temperat astrum. In Walton's case, since a Daimon or a Genius would be too lofty for the business, might we not take the Brownie of our own Northern mythology for the type of such superior endowment as he clearly had? We can fancy him ministered to by such a homely and helpful creature, — not a genius exactly, but answering the purpose sufficiently well, and marking a certain natural distinction in those it singles out for its innocent and sportful companionship. And it brings a blessing also to those who treat it kindly, as Walton did.

Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manebunt.

MILTON'S "AREOPAGITICA."

1890.

DURING the hurly-burly of the English Civil War, which made the bee in every man's bonnet buzz all the more persistently to be let forth, whoever would now write to his newspaper was driven, for want of that safety-valve, to indite a pamphlet, and, as he believed that the fate of what for the moment was deemed the Universe hung on his opinion, was eager to make it public ere the opportune moment should be gone by forever. Every one of these enthusiasts felt as Robert Owen did when he said to Wilberforce, "What, Sir, would you put off the happiness of Mankind till the next session of Parliament?" Every crotchet and whimsey, too, became the nucleus of a sect, and, as if Old England could not furnish enough otherwisemindedness of her own, New England sent over Rogers and Gorton to help in the confusion of tongues. All these sects, since each singly was in a helpless and often hateful minority, were united in the assertion of their right to freedom of opinion and to the uncurtailed utterance of whatever they fancied that opinion to be. Many of them, it should seem, could hardly fail in their mental vagabondage to stumble upon the principle of universal