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.
George Herbert.
This is a name which will be more familiar to the reader, and if he has never encountered the little olive-green, gilt-edged budget of Herbert’s[40] poems, he can hardly have failed to have met, on some page of the anthologies, such excerpt as this about Virtue:
“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.