Wotton and Walton.
Another great traveller of these times—but one whose dignities would, I suspect have kept him away from the Devil Tavern—was Sir Henry Wotton.[35] He was a man who had supplemented his university training by long residence abroad; who had been of service to King James (before the King had yet left Scotland) by divulging to him and defeating some purposed scheme of poisoning. Wotton was, later, English ambassador at the brilliant court of Venice, whence he wrote to the King many suggestions respecting the improvement of his garden, detailing Italian methods, and forwarding grafts and rare seedlings; he was familiar with most European courts—hobnobbed with Doges and with Kings, was a scholar of elegant and various accomplishments, and the reputed maker of that old and well-worn witticism about ambassadors—that “they were honest men, sent to lie abroad for the good of their country.” He was, furthermore, himself boastful of the authorship of this prickly saying, “The itch of disputation is the scab of the church.”[36] There is also a charming little poem of his—which gets place in the anthologies—addressed to that Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, whom we encountered as a bride at the Castle of Heidelberg, and who became the mother of the accomplished and daring Prince Rupert. Such a man as Wotton, full of anecdote, bristling with wit, familiar with courts, and one who could match phrases with James, or Charles, or Buckingham, in Latin, or French, or Italian, must have been a god-send for a dinner-party at Theobalds, or at Whitehall. To crown his graces, Walton[37] tells us that he was an excellent fisherman.
And this mention of the quiet Angler tempts me to enroll him here, a little before his time; yet he was well past thirty when James died, and must have been busy in the ordering of his draper’s shop in Fleet Street when Charles I. came to power. He was of Staffordshire birth, and no millinery of the city could have driven out of his mind the pretty ruralities of his Staffordshire home, and the lovely far-off views of the Welsh hills. His first wife was grandniece of Bishop Cranmer; he was himself friend of Dr. Donne, to whom he listened from Sunday to Sunday; a second wife was sister of that Thomas Ken who came to be Bishop of Bath and Wells; so he was hemmed in by ecclesiasticisms, and loved them as he loved trout. He was warm Royalist always, and lived by old traditions in Church and State—not easily overset by Reformers. No fine floral triumphs of any new gardeners, however accredited, could blind him to the old glories of the eglantine or of a damask rose. A good and quiet friend, a placid book, a walk under trees, made sufficient regalement for him. These, with a fishing bout (by way of exceptional entertainment), and a Sunday in a village church, with the Litany well intoned, were all in all to him. His book holds spicy place among ranks of books, as lavender keeps fresh odor among stores of linen. It is worth any man’s dalliance with the fishing-craft to make him receptive to the simplicities and limpidities of Walton’s Angler. I am tempted to say of him again, what I have said of him before in other connection:—very few fine writers of our time could make a better book on such a subject to-day, with all the added information and all the practice of the newspaper columns. What Walton wants to say, he says. You can make no mistake about his meaning; all is as lucid as the water of a spring. He does not play upon your wonderment with tropes. There is no chicane of the pen; he has some pleasant matters to tell of, and he tells of them—straight.
Another great charm about Walton is his childlike truthfulness. I think he is almost the only earnest trout-fisher (unless Sir Humphry Davy be excepted) whose report could be relied upon for the weight of a trout. I have many excellent friends—capital fishermen—whose word is good upon most concerns of life, but in this one thing they cannot be religiously confided in. I excuse it; I take off twenty per cent. from their estimates without either hesitation, anger, or reluctance.
I must not omit to mention his charming biographic sketches (rather than “lives”) of Hooker, of Wotton, of Herbert, of Donne—the letterpress of all these flowing easily and limpidly as the brooks he loved to picture. He puts in very much pretty embroidery too, for which tradition or street gossip supplied him with his needs, in figure and in color; this is not always of best authenticity, it is true;[38] but who wishes to question when it is the simple-souled and always honest Walton who is talking? And as for his great pastoral of The Complete Angler—to read it, in whatever season, is like plunging into country air, and sauntering through lovely country solitudes.
I name Sir Thomas Overbury[39]—who was the first, I think, to make that often-repeated joke respecting people who boasted of their ancestry, saying “they were like potatoes, with the best part below ground”—because he belonged to this period, and was a man of elegant culture and literary promise. He was poisoned in the Tower at the instance of some great people about the court of James, who feared damaging testimony of his upon a trial that was just then to come off; and this trial and poisoning business, in which (Carr) Somerset and Lady Essex were deeply concerned, made one of the greatest scandals of the scandalous court of King James. Overbury’s Characters are the best known of his writings, but they are slight; quaint metaphors and tricksy English are in them, with a good many tiresome affectations of speech. What he said of the Dairymaid is best of all.