for him should he persist in making verse the interpreter of his thought; so much the better for him should he wisely abandon it for something closer to the habitual dialect of men. I think that Walton's prose owes much of its charm to the poetic sentiment in him which was denied a refuge in verse, and that his practice in metres may have given to his happier periods a measure and a music they would otherwise have wanted. That he had this practice has a direct bearing on the question of the authorship of "Thealma and Clearchus," of which I must say something at the proper time. Walton had not the strong passions which poets break to the light harness of verse, and indeed they and longevity such as his are foaled by dams of very different race. But he loved poetry, and the poetry he loved was generally good. He had also some critical judgment in it. Speaking of Marlowe's "Come live with me," and Raleigh's answer to it, he says, "They were old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good; I think much better than the strong lines that are now in fashion in this critical age." His simplicity, it should seem, was not only a gift, but a choice as well.

Not long before the publication of a volume of Donne's sermons (1640), Walton wrote a life of the author, which was prefixed to them. This piety was not volunteered, but devolved

on him by the death of their common friend, Sir Henry Wotton (December, 1639), for whom he had been collecting the material. Donne lost nothing, and the world gained much, by this substitution; for Walton thus learned by accident where his true talent lay, and was encouraged to write those other Lives which, with this, make the volume that has endeared him to all who choose that their souls should keep good company. In a preface, beautiful alike for its form and the sentiment embodied in it, after a pretty apology for his own deficiencies, he says, "But be this to the disadvantage of the person represented, certain I am it is to the advantage of the beholder who shall here see the author's [Donne] picture in a natural dress, which ought to beget faith in what is spoken." And not only that, but Walton's picture too! In this preference of the homely and familiar, and in an artlessness which is not quite so artless as it would fain appear, lies the charm that never stales of Walton's manner. He would have applied his friend Wotton's verse to himself, and affirmed "simple truth his utmost skill," but he was also a painstaking artist in his own way.

As illustrations, take this sentence from the "Life of Donne," describing him after the death of his wife:

"Thus, as the Israelites sat mourning by the rivers of Babylon when they remembered Zion,

so he gave some ease to his oppressed heart by thus venting his sorrows; thus he began the day and ended the night; ended the restless night and began the weary day in lamentations."

Or this, of the nightingale, worthy to compete with Crashawe's, or with Jeremy Taylor's lark: "But the nightingale, another of my airy creatures, breathes such sweet loud music out of her little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind to think miracles are not ceased. He

that at midnight, when the very laborer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have very often, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say, 'Lord, what music hast Thou provided for the saints in heaven, when Thou affordest bad men such music on earth?""

He had learned of his great contemporaries also to turn and wind those many-membered periods which in unskilful hands become otherwise-minded as a herd of swine. The passage in the Introduction to his revised "Life of Donne" where he compares himself to Pompey's bondman, and that in the Preface to the "Life of Herbert" in which he speaks of Mary Magdalene, may serve as examples; and in these neither are the words caught at random, nor do they fall into those noble modulations by chance. And he could be succinct at need, as

where he says: "He that praises Richard Hooker praises God, who hath given such gifts to men."

Walton tells us that he saw the Scotch Covenanters, when in 1644 they "came marching with it [the Covenant] gloriously upon their pikes and in their hats. . . . This I saw and suffered by it," whether in mind or purse he leaves doubtful. In this year he ceased to be an inhabitant of the Parish of St. Dunstan; and from that time till 1650, when he took a house in Clerkenwell, he for the most part vanishes. We know incidentally that he was in London once in the course of the year 1645, and once again in that of 1647. But these may have been flying visits, for there is no evidence that his second marriage (1646) took place there; and the statement of Antony à Wood, who knew him well, makes it probable that he may have spent at Stafford, where he had a small property, the years during which he cannot be shown to have lived anywhere else. To a man with his opinions, London could not have been more amiable during the Long Parliament and the Protectorate than during the reign of Charles II. to a man of his morals.

The solitude of Stafford, where, to cite his own words, he could

"Linger long days by Swaynham brook,"

seems more suitable to the conception and gesta

tion of such a book as the "Complete Angler" than London could have been to a man whose companionable instincts were so strong that even fishing was not perfect happiness without a friend to share it.

That the "Angler" was begun some years before it was published is rendered more probable by Walton's saying of Marlowe's song which he quotes, that it "was made at least fifty years ago." He was likely to know something about Marlowe through his own friendship with Drayton, who was the first adequately to signalize the poet's merit. Marlowe died in 1593, and the "at least fifty years "would bring us down to the Stafford period. There are passages in Walton which lead me to think he may have spent abroad some part of the time during which he is invisible to us. He set great store by the advantages of foreign travel, and gave his son the benefit of them.

It seems likely that he gave up business in 1644, and it may have been at Stafford that he saw some foraging party from Leslie's army which would not have spared his uncovenanted chickens. Internal evidence makes it likely that in 1646 he wrote the preface to Quarles's "Shepherd's Eclogues," and that he was on terms of friendly acquaintance with him as a brother of the angle. He may have borrowed the name "Clora" from Quarles. It is true that he has