Street. By 1640 he had risen to be a doctor of divinity, prebendary of St. Paul's and chaplain to the king, as well as rector of St. Martin's Ongar, London, and of Sandon, Essex; he was also for a short time rector of St. Giles'-in-the-Fields. He had made himself obnoxious to the puritan party as the active representative of the London clergy in their controversy with the citizens respecting tithes; the elaborate treatise, chiefly historical, which he drew up on the subject, was not completely published until 1752. In 1641 he was deprived of his benefices; in 1642 he was treated as a delinquent and took refuge at Oxford, where he met Dr. Fuller, dean of Ely, whose daughter became his second wife. Probably after the surrender of Oxford to the parliament he returned to London, and lived in the house of his father-in-law. The publication of the magnificent but costly Paris Polyglott of Le Jay was completed in 1645, and in 1652 Walton issued, with a specimen, proposals for his own. Selden and Usher announced their approval of the scheme, and the council of state granted him permission, afterwards renewed by Cromwell, to import the paper for the work duty-free. One copy was to be supplied for £10, six for £50, and Walton's Polyglott is said to have been, with the exception of Minsheu's Dictionary, the first work published in England by subscription. £9000 were soon subscribed and contributed. As an aid to its students, Walton published in 1654 an "Introductio ad lectionem linguarum Orientalium." Vol. I. of the Polyglott itself appeared in September, 1654, and the publication of the work, in six volumes, was completed in 1657. Pocock and Usher revised the earlier sheets, and among the scholars who gave their aid to the work were Lightfoot, Wheelock, Clarke, Sanderson, and above all Dr. Edmund Castell, whose valuable Lexicon Heptaglotton, a lexicographical appendix to the Polyglott, was published in two volumes in 1669. The first volume of the Polyglott consists of prolegomena, which have been several times republished separately, the sixth of various readings and critical remarks. There is a full account of this great work, as of its editor and his assistants—one less splendid but more useful than the Paris Polyglott, the best of its predecessors—in Todd's Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Brian Walton, 2 vols., London, 1821, which also contains Walton's "Considerator Considered," being his reply to Dr. John Owen's depreciatory Considerations, published in 1659. Nine languages are used in the work, but no one book is given in so many. The gospels are given in six languages. The Chaldee paraphrase is more complete than in any former polyglott, and some parts of the Bible are printed in Æthiopic and Persian, neither of which were to be found in any similar work. Of the sixteen manuscripts collated by Archbishop Usher for Walton's Polyglott, some are said not to have been examined since. In the preface to the original edition an acknowledgment was made of Cromwell's furtherance of the work, but the reference to the Protector was expunged at the Restoration. Copies containing the original preface are highly valued by book-collectors. After the Restoration Walton presented his Polyglott to Charles II., was appointed one of the royal chaplains, and in 1661 bishop of Chester—an honour which he did not long enjoy, dying at London little more than ten months after his installation, on the 29th November, 1661.—F. E.
WALTON, Izaak, "the common father of all anglers," was born at Stafford, August, 1593, and three years afterwards was left an orphan. Of his education no record is left. In early life he settled in London as a sempster or hosier. His first place of business was in a small shop near the Exchange, or what Hawkins, his biographer and editor, calls the "royal burse in Cornhill." Prior to 1624 he had removed to Fleet Street, occupying a shop, or a half-shop, two doors west of Chancery Lane, and doing business as a linendraper. In 1632 he is found in Chancery Lane engaging in the same calling; and about this time he married Anne, daughter of Thomas Ken of Furnival's inn, and sister or half-sister to the famous Bishop Ken. This was his second marriage—his first wife appears to have been a niece of Archbishop Cranmer, and none of her children survived her. About 1644 he left Chancery Lane, and retired from business with a small competency. He now sojourned in various places—chiefly in the families of clergymen. In his later years, or after 1662, he took up his abode with Dr. Morley, bishop of Winchester. Almost nothing is known of his private history. His companions were royalists; and after the battle of Worcester the "Lesser George" was for some time in his custody. His friends and correspondents were numerous—such as Usher, Chillingworth, Hales of Eton, Sandys, Hammond, Thomas Fuller, and Bishops Sheldon, Morton, King, and Barlow. Through his good constitution, his gentle exercise in angling, his lettered ease and happy temperament, his life was prolonged to his ninetieth year, and he died at Winchester during a great frost, on the 13th of December, 1683, in the house of Prebendary Hawkins. He was buried in the south aisle of the cathedral, and on a flat marble stone is a poetical inscription to his memory. He left a son and a daughter: to the one, amidst other legacies, he left Sibbes' Soul's Conflict, and to the other his Bruised Reed. Their mother had died in 1662, and was buried in Worcester cathedral. Her tombstone bears a remarkable monumental inscription. Walton has been immortalized by his literary labours. His five biographies of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, Herbert, and Sanderson are unsurpassed in interest—
" The feather whence the pen
Was shaped, that traced the lives of those good men,
Dropped from an angel's wing."
His first literary work was an elegy on the death of Dr. Donne, in 1633; and his "Life of Donne" was prefixed to a volume of his sermons published in 1640. He had been gathering some materials for Sir Henry Wotton, "that great master of language and art," who had undertaken to write Donne's Life, but he died ere he had completed the work. Walton then took the task upon himself; and that, he says, "begot a like necessity of writing the life of his and my ever-honoured friend Sir Henry Wotton." His "Life of Wotton," prefixed to the Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, was published in 1651. Twenty years afterwards he published the "Life of Hooker;" one purpose being to correct the mistakes made by Bishop Gauden in his life of that eloquent divine. In 1670 appeared the "Life of Herbert"—"a free-will offering;" Bishop Henchman of London supplying him with many of the materials. In 1678 he published the "Life of Sanderson," one of his intimate friends for forty years, the biographer himself being in his eighty-fifth year; a period, he says, when his "age might have procured him a writ of ease." All these lives are quiet and natural portraits, lovingly and truthfully executed by a hearty admirer. They were very notable men themselves; and their lives by "honest Izaak" hold their place among English classics. The collected lives were published in 1671, with a dedication to the bishop of Winchester. But Walton's best known literary production is his "Complete Angler, or Contemplative Man's Recreation." It appeared in 1653, and has gone through numerous editions. The motto to the first edition was—"Simon Peter said, I go a fishing; and they said. We also go with thee;" but it was wisely cancelled in subsequent editions. This "pleasant curiosity of fish and fishing" is a series of dialogues—no long "and watery discourse," but truly a rich entertainment—quaint, humorous, and cheerful; abounding in happy touches of wit and raillery, practical wisdom, sagacious reflections, and snatches of poetry and song. While his lectures on his art are so clear and so curious, his digressions are ever most amusing. His love of nature is unbounded, and his mood is one of universal charity. He unconsciously gives us his own portrait, described as "honest, ingenious, quiet, and harmless." "I am not of a cruel nature," says he; "I love to kill nothing but fish." The art also is no mean one, for, he adds, "God Almighty is said to have spoken to a fish, but never to a beast." His favourite place of angling when he was in London was the river Lea. The kindness of his nature often peeps out, as when he tells his friend and disciple, who had caught his first chub, "it is a good beginning of your art to offer your first-fruits to the poor, who will both thank you and God for it." He was no ascetic, for he liked "the barley-wine, the good liquor that our honest forefathers did use to drink of," and he loved such mirth "as did not make friends ashamed to look on one another next morning." His humour is sometimes quite comic, as when, after instructing his listener and companion in the art of impaling a frog upon a hook, and securing the upper part of its leg by one loop to the arming wire, he naively adds, "In so doing, use him as you loved him." His serene heart is ever going out in admiration of the clear stream in its shallows, pools, and flowery banks; the shady trees, the odorous honeysuckle, the green pastures, the disporting of the lambs, the hum of the bee, the clouds and sky, and the song of the linnet and the lark, the blackbird and thrush. And his piety has ever an unaffected charm, as when he says—"Every misery that I miss is a new mercy;" or when, after referring to the "sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling" of the voice of the
