Besides the "Contentation "3 and the "Retirement," which in natural pathos and moral feeling have perhaps never been excelled, Cotton addressed the following invitation to Walton to renew their piscatory sports in the ensuing May; but the year in which these verses were written is not mentioned :

Whilst all the ills are so improv'd
Of this dead quarter of the year,
That even you, so much belov'd,
We would not now wish with us here;

In this estate, I say, it is

Some comfort to us to suppose,
That in a better clime than this

You, our dear friend, have more repose;

And some delight to me the while,
Though nature does now weep in rain,
To think that I have seen her smile,
And haply may I do again.

If the all-ruling Power please
We live to see another May,
We'll recompense an age of these
Foul days in one fine fishing-day;

We then shall have a day or two,
Perhaps a week, wherein to try,
What the best Master's hand can do
With the most deadly killing fly.

A day without too bright a beam,
A warm but not a scorching sun,
A southern gale to curl the stream,
And, Master, half our work is done.

There whilst behind some bush we wait,
The scaly people to betray,
We'll prove it just, with treach'rous bait,
To make the preying trout our prey;

And think ourselves in such an hour
Happier than those, though not so high,
Who, like leviathans, devour

Of meaner men, the smaller fry.

This, my best friend, at my poor home
Shall be our pastime and our theme;
But then should you not deign to come,
You make all this a flatt'ring dream." 5

Notwithstanding Walton's very advanced age might, as he himself says, have procured him "a writ of ease," he continued to employ himself in literary pursuits; and at a period of life to which few men attain, and at which still fewer are capable of intellectual exertion, he commenced the Life of Robert Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln, a work requiring as much vigour of mind as any he had written, and which he completed with equal success. The volume was published about May 1678,6 and like the Memoir of Hooker, and the collected edition of the Lives of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, and Herbert, was inscribed to Dr Morley, whose continued favours demanded a new testimony of his gratitude. As this was Walton's last work, and as whatever relates to him at so advanced

5 Cotton's Poems, ed. 1689, p. 114.

The imprimatur is dated on the 7th of May 1678.

a stage of his existence is of peculiar interest, everything which occurs in it illustrative of his own feelings or situation will be here introduced.

The dedication commences with an acknowledgment of Bishop Morley's kindness; and shows that through Morley he had become acquainted with Sanderson, Chillingworth, and Dr Hammond :

"MY LORD,-If I should undertake to enumerate the many favours and advantages I have had by my very long acquaintance with your lordship, I should enter upon an employment that might prove as tedious as the collecting of the materials for this poor monument, which I have erected, and do dedicate to the memory of your beloved friend Dr Sanderson. But though I will not venture to do that; yet I do remember with pleasure, and remonstrate with gratitude, that your lordship made me known to him, Mr Chillingworth, and Dr Hammond, men whose merits ought never to be forgotten. My friendship with the first was begun almost forty years past, when I was as far from a thought, as a desire to outlive him; and farther from an intention to write his life: but the wise Disposer of all men's lives and actions hath prolonged the first, and now permitted the last; which is here dedicated to your lordship (and as it ought to be) with all humility, and a desire that it may remain as a public testimony of my gratitude. My Lord, your most affectionate old Friend, and most humble Servant, IZAAK WALTON."

66

In the preface Walton says: "I confess" the Life of Dr Sanderson was worthy the employment of some person of more learning and greater abilities than I can pretend to; and I have not a little wondered that none have yet been so grateful to him and posterity as to undertake it for as it may be noted, that our Saviour had a care, that for Mary Magdalen's kindness to him, her name should never be forgotten: so I conceive the great satisfaction many scholars have already had, and the unborn world is like to have by his exact, clear, and useful learning; and might have by a true narrative of his matchless meekness, his calm fortitude, and the innocence of his whole life : doth justly challenge the like from this present age; that posterity may not be ignorant of them and it is to me a wonder, that it has been already fifteen years neglected. But, in saying this, my meaning is not to upbraid others (I am far from that) but excuse myself, or beg pardon for daring to attempt it. This being premised, I desire to tell the reader that in this relation I have been so bold, as to paraphrase and say what I think he (whom I had the happiness to know well) would have said upon the same occasions; and if I have been too bold in doing so, and cannot now beg pardon of him that loved me, yet I do of my reader, from whom I desire the same favour. And though my age might have procured me a writ of ease, and that secured me

from all further trouble in this kind; yet I met with such persuasions to undertake it, and so many willing informers since, and from them and others, such helps and encouragements to proceed, that when I found myself faint, and weary of the burthen with which I had loaden myself, and sometime ready to lay it down; yet time and new strength hath at last brought it to be what it now is, and here presented to the reader.

"And lastly, the trouble being now past, I look back and am glad that I have collected these memoirs of this humble man, which lay scattered, and contracted them into a narrower compass; and, if I have, by the pleasant toil of doing so, either pleased or profited any man, I have attained what I designed when I first undertook it but I seriously wish, both for the reader's, and Dr Sanderson's sake, that posterity had known his great learning and virtue by a better pen; by such a pen, as could have made his life as immortal as his learning and merits ought to be."

Having stated that Sanderson had, during a period of distress, received a sum of money from the learned Boyle through the hands of Dr Barlow, then Bishop of Lincoln, Walton solicited that prelate to relate the circumstance, and to give him any other information in his power respecting Sanderson, with which request he complied, in a letter to Walton, dated on the 10th of May 1678, which is annexed to the memoir. Bishop Barlow, who addressed him as 66 My worthy friend Mr Walton," expressed his satisfaction that he had undertaken to write Sanderson's life, "because," he said, "I know your ability to know, and integrity to write truth," and he subscribed himself, "your affectionate friend."

When writing the account of Bishop Sanderson's death, Walton seems to have been very deeply impressed with the close approach of his own; and he concluded the memoir with this allusion to that event: "Thus this pattern of meekness and primitive innocence changed this for a better life. '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.' Ps. xxxii. 2,"

When the Life of Sanderson was reprinted and prefixed to the Bishop's Sermons, Walton made those corrections which in the

7

7 On that occasion the above passage was slightly altered, as it there stands :"Thus this pattern of meekness and primitive innocence changed this for a better

postscript to the first edition he says he then wished to have done, but was prevented by the manuscript being hastened from him. To the edition of Sanderson's Life which was printed in 1678, Walton added a letter which he had received from Dr Pierce, dated at North Tidworth, 5th March 1678, in which he addressed him as "Good Mr Walton," on the subject of Sanderson's correspondence, and referred him to some materials for his life of that prelate.

A copy of Bishop Sanderson's Sermons which belonged to Walton is preserved, and was probably the one which is mentioned in his will. In the title-page its original owner has written "Izaak Walton, June 25°, 1658, price 155." Numerous passages of the celebrated preface to the "Fourteen Sermons" are marked by him, because they expressed opinions similar to his own. Several marginal notes occur, containing the names of the persons to whom Sanderson alluded, and he has copied at length all the texts which are referred to. At the end of the preface to the "Twenty Sermons," Walton has written, "This Preface is an humble and bold challenge to the dissenting brethren of the Clergy of England: And was writ by that humble and good man the author, in the times of persecution and danger;" and in his Life of Sanderson he alludes to it in very similar terms.8

About the year 1678, Walton determined on publishing a poem entitled “Thealma and Clearchus," a pastoral history “in smooth and easy verse," which had been written many years before by John Chalkhill, Esq., “an acquaintant and friend of Edmund Spencer." Walton's preface is dated on the 7th of May 1678, though the first edition of the poem which has been discovered, was not printed until 1683. The reprint of Thealma and Clearchus in 1820 exhibits an amusing specimen of critical sagacity, as it is therein gravely asserted that "Chalkhill is but a name unappropriated a verbal phantom-a shadow of a shade," and the authorship of the poem is attributed to Walton himself; whereas an life:-'tis now too late to wish that mine may be like his: for I am in the eighty-fifth year of my age; and God knows it hath not; but I most humbly beseech Almighty God that my death may: and I do as earnestly beg, that if any reader shall receive any satisfaction from this very plain, and as true relation, he will be so charitable as to say Amen. I. W.

"Blessed is that man in whose spirit there is no guile. Ps. xxxii. 2."

Ed. Zouch, vol. ii. p. 250.

This hypothesis has been adopted in the Retrospective Review (vol. iv. p. 231), in Major's edition of the "Complete Angler," and was even exaggerated in a long note to an edition of Zouch's Life of Walton, published by Prowett in 1823. Its fallacy was first exposed by the late Archdeacon Nares, in the Gentleman's Magazine, upon the grounds of its extreme improbability, and that such a deception was utterly inconsistent with Walton's character. Mr Nares noticed the monumental inscription to John