The care which Walton spent on his productions seems to have been very great. He wrote and re-wrote, corrected, amended, rescinded, and added. This very poem—the Elegy on Donne—he completely remodelled in his old age, when he inserted it in the collection of his Lives. But we have thought it well to give the original version here as a literary curiosity, and the first work of his that has come down to us. The original Lives themselves—especially those of Wotton and Donne—were mere sketches of what they are in their present enlarged form.
Walton had the good fortune to be thrown very early in life into the society and intimacy of men who were his superiors in rank and education. But he had enough of culture, joined to his inherent reverence of mind, to appreciate and understand all that they had and he wanted.
The preface to Sir John Skeffington's Heroe of Lorenzo had for two centuries lain forgotten, and escaped the notice of Walton's biographers, till in 1852 it was discovered by Dr. Bliss of Oxford, and communicated by him to the late William Pickering.
The original Spanish work was first published in 1630. The author's real name was not Lorenzo, but Balthazar Gracian, a Jesuit of Aragon, who flourished during the first half of the seventeenth century, when the cultivated style took possession of Spanish prose, and rose to its greatest consideration.[5] It is a collection of short, wise apothegms and maxims for the conduct of life, sometimes illustrated by stories of valour, or prowess, or magnanimity, of the old Castilian heroes who figure in "Count Lucanor." The book, though now no longer read, must have been very popular at one time, for there exist two or three later English versions of it, without, however, the nervous concentration of style and idiomatic diction that characterize the translation sent forth to the world under Walton's auspices.
The two Letters published in 1680 under the title of Love and Truth,[6] were written respectively in the years 1668 and 1679. The evidence of their authorship is twofold, and we think quite conclusive. In one of the very few copies known to exist, and now in the library of Emanuel College, Cambridge, its original possessor, Archbishop Sancroft, has written:—"Is. Walton's 2 letters conc. ye Distemp's of ye Times, 1680," and Dr. Zouch appended to his reprint of the tract[7] a number of parallel passages from other acknowledged writings of Walton, of themselves almost sufficient to fix the question on internal evidence alone.
In the British Museum copy of this tract is the following note on one of the fly-leaves in the autograph of the late William Pickering:—
"The present is the only copy I have met with after twenty years'
search, excepting the one in Emanuel College, Cambridge. W. Pickering."
The copy described above [i.e., the Emanuel College copy] appears to be the same edition as the present [that now in the British Museum], but has the following variation. After the title-page is printed
The Author to the Stationer
"Mr. Brome," &c., and the Epistle ends with "Your friend," without the N.N. which is found in this copy. But what is more remarkable, the printed word Author is run through, and corrected with a pen, and over it written Publisher, which is evidently in the handwriting of Walton. So Mr. Pickering further certifies.