but it is very much of an emblem; and, perhaps because of the immense abundance of emblem literature in those days, Fuller's conceits were constantly emblematic. 'The soldier at the same time shoot[ing] out his prayer to God and his pistol at his enemy'; the question 'Who hath sailed about the world of his own heart, sounded each creek, surveyed each corner, but that there still remains much terra incognita to himself?' both appeal vividly to the mind's eye. Indeed, the conceit almost necessarily, even in similes of the most solemn cast, leads to witticism intended or unintentional; for each is intimately concerned with the discovery, elaborate or spontaneous, of similarity or dissimilarity. Even the serious Browne, in his most serious work, has become almost Fullerian in his remark on the deluge that 'fishes could not wholly have escaped, except the salt ocean were handsomely contempered by a mixture of the fresh element.' But Fuller himself positively aims at these things; or, at least, certainly in his less professional work, and sometimes elsewhere, never spares a jest when it presents itself to him.

It is almost unavoidable that such a style should incline less to the continuous harmonic cadence than to shorter moulds and measures. Fuller is by no means jerky, and he would not have been of his time if he had never used long sentences. But he does not incline to them; and his paragraphs are apt to be even shorter proportionally than their constituents. He has all the love of his day for an aphoristic and apophthegmatic delivery; though an occasional cause of lengthening in his sentences is his habit of shading or tailing off a serious statement of fact or axiom of opinion into a jest.

Fuller invites selection and has had his share of it. Hardly any book of his has so formal a plan or such consecutiveness of argument that piecemeal citation injures it; and it may well seem that the process of 'creaming' can be justly and safely applied to a writer who is both desultory and jocular. But it may be doubted whether such selections give the reader a fair idea of his author, even if that reader be well disposed towards both the midseventeenth century and its characteristic quaintness. For, we must once more remember that the conceits and the quips were by no means intended merely to amuse; they were meant, partly, to act as sugarplums for the serious passages, and, partly, to drive these passages closer home by humorous application or illustration. To expect all or many readers to read all Fuller's books would be unreasonable; but nobody should think that he

understands Fuller until he has read at least one of them as a book.

Except in regard to Reliquiae Wottonianae, and, perhaps, even to this in most points beyond its title, the work of Izaak Walton, by which he is almost universally known, may not seem to 'intrude him upon antiquaries' as Browne has it; but he was no mean example of the temperament, then common, which creates the antiquarian tendency. Born in East Gate street, Stafford, on 9 August 1593, he represented, through his father James, a family of yeomen; but he was early sent to London to be apprenticed to Thomas Grinsell and became a freeman of the Ironmongers' company on 12 November 1618, having previously settled down in the neighbourhood of Fleet street and Chancery lane. His residence near St Dunstan's brought him into contact with Donne. Jonson, Drayton, bishops Hall and King, Sir Henry Wotton and others were, also, his friends; and, by 1619, his connection with literature is, to some extent, shown by the dedication to him of the poems of a certain 'S. B.' For a long time, we hear nothing of him; but, in 1640, he published his life of Donne, and, four years later, left London, though he was back at the time of Laud's execution. In 1650, he is found living at Clerkenwell, and, next year, published Reliquiae. In an unobtrusive way, he seems to have been a trusted member of the royalist party; and he had Charles II's 'lesser George' confided to his care after Worcester. In 1653, The Compleat Angler (not yet complete) appeared; five years later, he wrote his name on Casaubon's tablet in Westminster abbey; and, in 1662, took up his abode, after the hospitable fashion of great households in those days, with his friend bishop Morley of Winchester. His other Lives followed at intervals. In 1682, he published Chalkhill's Thealma and Clearchus1, and he died at the house of his son-in-law Hawkins (a Winchester prebendary who had married his daughter Anne) on 15 December 1683. He had been twice married: first, in 1626, to Rachel Floud (a collateral descendant of archbishop Cranmer), who died in 1640; then, in 1646, to Anne Ken, half and elder sister to the future bishop who wrote Walton's epitaph. His second wife died twenty years before him.

Walton's long life was thus divided into two periods; and it was only in the later of these that he had full leisure. But this was a leisure of forty unbroken years; and it is not likely that the work

1 See ante, chap. IV.

of the earlier time was very severe or strenuous. That his tastes, his avocations, his associations were thoroughly literary, there is no doubt; but they do not seem to have prompted him to any extensive or frequent literary exercise. The world-famous Compleat Angler and the widely known Lives go together in one moderate sized volume (even with Cotton's part of the firstnamed). There is no valid reason whatever for crediting him with the authorship of Thealma and Clearchus. And the minor works and anecdota, which the diligence of R. H. Shepherd collected some thirty years ago, are of little importance and less bulk.

It has generally been conceded that the absence of quantity is more than made up by the presence of quality, but the quantity of that quality itself has been made the subject of dispute, sometimes unnecessarily (and, in reference to Walton, most inappropriately) ill-tempered. In The Compleat Angler, it has been pronounced by some to be the result of consummate literary art; while, to others, it seems to be-there almost exclusively, and, in the Lives, to no small extent-purely natural and unpremeditated, the spontaneous utterance of a 'happy old man' (as Flatman, with complete felicity, if not complete originality, called him), who has lived with men of letters, and is familiar with letters themselves, but who no more thinks of picking words and turning phrases than a nurse does in telling tales to a child. But this dispute could hardly be settled without settling what 'literary art' is, and that would be a long process. Nor is the settlement of the actual quarrel a matter of absorbing interest. The fact remains that the singular and golden simplicity of Walton's style -in The Compleat Angler more especially but, except when the occasion seems to insist on more ceremony, also in the Lives— is matter of common ground and of no dispute whatever. Walton was a man of no inconsiderable reading; and he could not have been a man of his time if he had been shy of showing it, however completely his character might lack pretension. But not Bunyan himself can use a plainer and purer vernacular than Walton when he chooses, as he generally does choose. On the much rarer occasions when he 'talks book' a little (as in the passage about the 'silver stream gliding towards the tempestuous sea,' which preludes the scene with Maudlin and 'Come live with me and be my love'), he may, possibly, be aiming higher, but he goes much wider of his mark.

If this naturalness of style be duly considered, it will, perhaps, be found to diminish, if not to remove altogether, any surprise

that might otherwise be felt at the production of so little work in so long a life; at the remarkable excellence of the product; and at its curious variety. Personal interest, and nothing else, appears to have been the sole starting influence, so far as matter goes, in every case, even in that of the life of Hooker1; and personal quality, and nothing else, to have been the fashioner of the style. Anything -country, scenery, old-fashioned manners, piety, the strange complexity of Donne, the simplicity (patient in life, massive and independent in letters) of Hooker, the various characteristics of Wotton and Herbert and Sanderson, the pastoral-romantic fairyland of Chalkhill-all these things, in one way or another, were brought directly home to him, and he made them at home without parade, and, with perfect homeliness and ease, as Philemon and Baucis did the gods who visited them, to speak in the manner of his own time.

The result was what ease generally brings with it-charm. There have been, from his own time downwards, fishermen who were contemptuous of his fishing; and recent biographers have been contemptuous of anyone who should be content with the facts of his biographies. The competent orbis terrarum of readers has always been careless of either contempt. In his case, as in almost all, the charm is not really to be analysed, or, rather, it is possible to distinguish the parts, but necessary to recognise that the whole is much greater than these parts put together. The angling directions might fail to interest, and the angling erudition succeed in boring; as to the subjects of the Lives, though they were all remarkable men in their different ways, only Donne can be said to have an intense interest of personality. The source of attraction is Walton, not the 'chub or chavender,' or the Hertfordshire meadows and streams, or Maudlin and 'red cow,' or the decent joviality of my brother Peter, or Hooker's misfortunes in marriage, or Sir Henry Wotton's scholarly urbanity, but these things, as Walton shows them to us, with art so unpremeditated, that, as has been said, some would deny it to be art at all, yet with the effect of consummate mimesis of presentation of nature with something of the individual presenter added. But it will hardly be denied that his grace is positively enhanced by the characteristic which he shares with the other subjects of this chapter-the quaint, and, in him, almost unexpected seasoning of learning. He has it, no doubt, least of the

1 Walton quotes from Hooker the words 'as discernible as a natural from an artificial beauty.' They were not without application in his own case.

four; and what he has he neither obtrudes and caricatures like Urquhart, nor makes his main canvas like Browne, nor associates pell-mell with play of conceit and purpose of instruction, as does Fuller. With him, it is a sort of silver or gold lacing to the sober grey garment of his thought and diction, though it should always be remembered that grey is capable of almost more fascinating shades than any other colour, and sets off the most delicate textures admirably.

To dwell at any length on the fashion in which this sober grace is brought out in The Compleat Angler would be superfluous; but a word or two may be permitted. No book so well deserves as a motto that stanza of The Palace of Art which describes the English home,' 'a haunt of ancient Peace,' with 'dewy pastures, dewy trees.' There is no dulness and no stagnation; the characters walk briskly, talk vigorously and argumentatively, fish, eat, drink like men of this world, and like cheerful and active men of a world that is going pretty well after all. But there is also no worry; nothing ugly, vulgar or jarring. It is the landscape and the company of The Faerie Queene passed through a slight sieve of realism, and crimeless; only, in the distance, perhaps, an erring gentleman, who reprehensibly derives his jests from Scripture or from want of decency. A land of Beulah in short-with a somewhat less disquieting atmosphere of lack of permanence, which the land of Beulah itself must have carried with it.

The birth-year of Thomas, afterwards Sir Thomas, Urquhart, or Urchard1-the best Scottish representative of the peculiar seventeenth century character which was exhibited in different ways in England by Burton earlier, and by Browne and Fuller in his own time-used to be assigned to the same date as Browne's, 1605. But this date has now, on good evidence, been shifted six years later, to 1611. His father, another Sir Thomas, represented the Urquharts of Cromarty, a family whose pedigree has been verified to the year 1300, while it may reasonably be extended to Adam, though the acceptance of the particulars (supplied, with characteristic pedantry and humour mingled, by the subject of this notice) may be facultative. The younger Thomas's mother was Christian Livingstone of the noble family of that name. His father succeeded to considerable estates; but was either a determined spendthrift or a very bad manager; and, in his later years (1637 to

1 He sometimes, if not always, signed himself so; using, as well, the initials 'C. P.', i.e. 'Christianus Presbyteromastix.'