tion." We enter the bed-chamber, cold and stately, with wainscot furniture and tester bed, and there see the faithful and affectionate Walton, whose soul was formed to be an altar for the fire of friendship, reverently bending over his loved and honoured minister. He tells us of unknown mournful friends who repaired to the tomb of "Donne, as Alexander the Great did to the grave of the famous Achilles, and strewed it with an abundance of curious and costly flowers." We are ready to think he was himself one of the number. How beautiful the reflection he makes over the sepulchre in old St. Paul's: "He was earnest and unwearied in the search of knowledge,, with which his vigorous soul is now satisfied, and employed in a continual praise of that God who first breathed it into his active body-that body which once was a temple of the Holy Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust. But," he adds, with sublime simplicity-the noble fruit of Christian faith-"I shall see it reanimated."

Walton did not remain long in the parish after Donne had gone to heaven. His many bereavements there threw sad associations over the place. He could not read, and go a-fishing pleasantly as he had done. His losses made him look at things in the neighbourhood through a melancholy medium, which darkly tinged all he saw; so he took leave of the place, and we lose sight of him for awhile altogether. He goes off into darkness and silence, whither the antiquaries follow and look for him in vain, till years after his shadowy presence brightens upon us somewhere about Clerkenwell.

Troublous times came over England in 1640, indeed had long before come over it, but now burst into a storm. London was often in fierce commotion. King and parliament, parliament and royal army, agitated the citizens from Temple Bar to Whitechapel. Men plunged into political strife, felt with vehemence, and acted with energy. Out of all this the shadow of our angler seems to

glide away in quest of nature's peace and loveliness. While Cavalier and Puritan were sharpening their swords for earnest strife, "Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the eventide.” He was no party man, and had friends whom he retained on both sides, though his sympathies were doubtless with the royalists; and, indeed, we find him entrusted with one of the badges of the order of the garter -the lesser George, as it is called, which Charles II. had delivered up to a friend for safe keeping after the battle of Worcester. "It was," says Ashmole, a friend of Walton's, "strangely preserved by Colonel Blague, one of that king's dispersed attendants, who resigned it for safety to the wife of Mr. Barlow, of Blarepipe House, in Staffordshire, where he took sanctuary; from whom Robert Milward, Esq., received and gave it into the hands of Mr. Isaak Walton, (all loyalists). It came again into Blague's possession, then prisoner in the Tower, whence making his escape, he restored it to King Charles II." We suppose Walton gave or sent the treasure to the captive in the Tower. The quiet man of the angle was trustworthy and unsuspected. "He was well known," says his friend in the herald's office, "and as well beloved of all good men."

Walton has been vastly praised for his moderation, meekness, and quietness. He disliked "the active Romanists," and "the restless Nonconformists," and was himself "one of the passive and peaceable Protestants" whose character he so much preferred. Now, with all our love and veneration for honest Isaak, we must think that this same peaceableness of his has been over-estimated. "In general and most certainly," says Dr. Arnold, “with our country life, and our English constitutions, partaking something of the coldness of our northern climate, it is extraordinary that any should have regarded this as a rare virtue, and praised the meekness of those who being themselves well-off, and having all their own desires contented, do not trouble themselves about the evils

which they do not feel, and complain of the noisy restlessness of the beggars in the street, while they are sitting at their ease in their warm and comfortable rooms. Isaak Walton might enjoy his angling undisturbed, in spite of Star Chamber, ship-money, High Commission Court, or popish ceremonies: what was the sacrifice to him of letting the public grievances take their own way, and enjoying the freshness of a May morning in the meadows on the banks of the Lea ?"

Between the writer of these eloquent words and Isaak Walton, as between the subject of this present paper and the last, as great a contrast exists as well can be. Baxter and Arnold were both earnest men-not only realizing as they did, both of them, the great spiritual truths of the Bible in relation to their own souls, but looking at them in their social aspects and bearings--and longing to see a perfected commonwealth, and a pure and comprehensive church; and labouring to reduce their ideal visions of these things to facts, and that with the force of their whole nature, which, in each of them, was as a cloud, "that moveth all together if it move at all." Men of the calibre of Baxter and Arnold make our confessors and our reformers-the true heroes of our country and of Christendom-those who do the double work, each painful in its turn, of pulling down what is old and rotten, and building up what is new and strong. For the overturning of error, for the exposition and establishment of truth, of course we must not look to men of the Isaak Walton stamp. If England had had no other sons, we are afraid there would have been neither reform nor puritanism, and the letting things alone to go and angle, or even write quaint and beautiful books like Walton's Angler, and Walton's Lives, would have entailed an amount of mental slavery and moral impotence on the England of this hour, which would have been a curse to every one of us. We are not blaming Walton, for he was not cut out for a reformer; his quiet neglect of the

stormy questions of the day was not a vice, neither was it a virtue -not censurable, neither was it admirable-but simply the following out of a natural tendency. But if any do set up Isaak as a model for all times and for all men, then we do demur most decidedly to their unwise judgment, and have no sympathy with their narrow admiration.

Walton mentions Ashmole in the "Complete Angler," and takes us down to his house at Lambeth, near London, where he shows us the antiquary's curiosities, abounding in specimens of natural history-to the heart's delight of the author, who pores over them there with unutterable interest. He enumerates "the hog-fish, the dog-fish, the dolphin, the coney-fish, the parrot-fish, the shark, the poison-fish, the sword-fish and other incredible fish ;" also the salamander and bird of paradise, snakes and solan geese, not forgetting the barnacles, which were said to grow on trees within shells like eggs, and then to drop off, and come out, soon to fledge and take their place with winged creatures-all of which is duly illustrated in a large wood-cut in Gerard's Herbal. In such recreations we can see Walton and Ashmole seeking relief from the angry storms of politics and war.

After leaving Chancery-lane, Walton married Anne Ken, halfsister of the nonjuring bishop of that name-a circumstance which links him with another of the celebrities of that age, though Ken did not perform the act which has made his memory so famous in English history till after Walton's death. The resistance of James the Second's commands by the seven bishops, who were imprisoned in the Tower, and afterwards so triumphantly acquitted, did not occur till 1687.

Walton died in 1683. In his will he devised to his son-in-law, Doctor Hawkins, and his wife, his "title and right of, or in part of, a house and shop in Paternoster-row," which he held by lease from the Lord Bishop of London for about fifty years to come. This

lease he took in 1662, and the house was called the Cross Keys. Though he resided about that time very much with his friend Dr. Morley, then recently made bishop of Winchester, whose residence was in Cheyne-walk, Chelsea, yet his name certainly becomes associated with the realm of the booksellers; and we think of Isaak in Paternoster-row; as, indeed, independently of any local connexion through residence or property, we could not help being reminded of him there, since his popular works bring before us the shadow of his presence, looking down upon us invitingly from the shelves of every bibliopolist's shop.

We are no lovers of angling; for, beside thinking there is cruelty in the sport, we believe we can better employ our time even in the way of recreation-though this is a daring thing to say in the presence of Walton's shade, whose portrait, lying before us as we write, seems to knit its brows while we pen the words. Yet, for all that, we love Walton's "Angler." There is a soft, gentle, benignant spirit pervading the whole, which irresistibly soothes us, when harassed with business and wearied with toil. We apprehend, that if we were to try to reduce to practice the fishing rules of the renowned author, we should, like Washington Irving, hook ourselves instead of the fish, and tangle our line in every tree, lose our bait, break our rod, and give up the attempt in despair, confessing that "angling is something like poetry-a man must be born to it." But reading his book,-not only under the green trees, but by the fire-side, and even in an omnibus going home from the city at eventide-has often refreshed us like the murmur of the brooks, and the fragrance of the cowslips, and the song of the early birds he so sweetly talks of. And if, perchance, we be careful and troubled about many things, and wonder how we are to obtain what is needful in this crowded world, so full of competition, it does us good to muse upon such a passage as this: "When I would beget content and increase confidence in the power and wisdom and providence of