Forget his powerful preaching, and forget
I am his convert:”—
words which indicate the writer’s spiritual obligation to that eminent orator. Walton’s marriage with his first wife brought him into “happy affinity” with the descendants of Archbishop Cranmer; and to this circumstance is attributed the origin of Walton’s Life of Hooker. The marriage with his second wife—half-sister to Bishop Ken—placed him, in his latter days, upon intimate terms with that holy prelate. Morley, Sanderson, and King were amongst his endeared associates.
Walton’s Lives give us glimpses of himself: for he is one of those artists who introduce their own portrait in a corner of their pictures. Of all his heroes, Bishop Sanderson was the man respecting whom he knew most; and, at the close of his memoir, Walton touchingly reveals his own spiritual aspiration:—“’Tis now too late to wish that my life may be like his, for I am in the eighty-fifth year of my age; but I humbly beseech Almighty God, that my death may; and do as earnestly beg of every reader to say, Amen.—‘Blessed is the man in whose spirit there is no guile.’” (Psalm xxxii. 2.)
His Complete Angler, or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, is a mirror of his life. His moral and religious sympathies are seen gleaming over his pages from beginning to end; and as the revelation of an inner life, the first part by himself should be compared with the second part by Cotton; we see at once that he was not born to be a reformer, that he was not one of those who can grapple with falsehood and corruption, and that if all had resembled him, England’s destiny would have been humiliating indeed,—we feel that in his case absence from any active part in the controversies of his time, can be regarded neither as a virtue nor as a vice, neither as censurable nor as admirable, but simply as the operation of a natural tendency.
Being what he was, he loved the quiet nooks and corners of human experience and interest, and in every place manifested purity, gentleness, meekness, and charity; as he wandered along the banks of the Lea, or sat in the fishing house beside the Dove, Scripture thoughts, like flowers, bright and sweet, entwined about the trellis-work of his cherished recreations; sacred thoughts, of the quaintest kind, gathered round his rod, and his fish-hooks, and that “most honest, ingenuous, quiet, and harmless art of angling.” “Evil communications, which corrupt good manners,” filled him with sadness. “Such discourse,” he observes, in one of his walks, “as we heard last night, it infects others, the very boys will learn to talk and swear as they heard mine host, and another of the company that shall be nameless; I am sorry the other is a gentleman, for less religion will not save their souls than a beggar’s; I think more will be required at the last great day.” He counted every misery he missed a new mercy, was thankful for health, competence, and a quiet conscience, and dwelt, with sympathetic joy, on the character of the meek man who has no “turbulent, repining, or vexatious thoughts,” who possesses what he has “with such a quietness as makes his very dreams pleasing both to God and himself.” “When,” he says in another place, “I would beget content, and increase confidence in the power, and wisdom, and providence of Almighty God, I will walk the meadows of some gliding stream, and there contemplate the lilies that take no care, and those very many other various little living creatures, that are not only created, but fed, man knows not how, by the goodness of the God of nature, and therefore trust in Him. This is my purpose, and so ‘let everything that hath breath praise the Lord;’ and let the blessing of St. Peter’s Master be with mine.”
Walton, at his death—amidst the great frost of 1683—could not but enter that world of perfect harmony to which his thoughts and desires had so often ascended as he listened to the nightingale. “He that at midnight, when the very labourer 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?” We now turn to another and somewhat different type of the same school.
JOHN EVELYN.
John Evelyn lost his mother when he had reached his fifteenth year; and her beautiful memory, as of one “whose constitution inclined to a religious melancholy, or pious sadness,” seemed to have remained with him all his days, giving that plaintiveness to his piety, which, as a richly-coloured thread, appears interwoven with the brightest joys of his calm yet active life. He records her death with reverential affection, and how she summoned her children around her, and expressed herself in a manner so heavenly, with instructions so pious and Christian, as made them strangely sensible of the extraordinary loss then becoming imminent:—after which, she gave to each a ring, with her blessing. Evelyn lost his father at twenty-one; and again he minutely relates the tale of his sorrow, how, at night, they followed the mourning hearse to the church at Wotton, where, after a sermon and funeral oration by the minister, the ashes of the husband were mingled with those of the wife. “Thus,” he adds, “we were bereft of both our parents, in a period when we[574] most of all stood in need of their counsel and assistance, especially myself, of a raw, vain, uncertain, and very unwary inclination; but so it pleased God to make trial of my conduct in a conjuncture of the greatest and most prodigious hazard that ever the youth of England saw; and, if I did not, amidst all this, impeach my liberty nor my virtue with the rest who made shipwreck of both, it was more the infinite goodness and mercy of God, than the least providence or discretion of mine own, who now thought of nothing but the pursuit of vanity, and the confused imaginations of young men.”[575]
JOHN EVELYN.