substantial yeomen long established in Staffordshire. Of his mother not even the name is known, and of his father we know only that his baptismal name was Jervis, and that he was buried on the 11th of February, 1596-97. Surely the short and simple annals of the poor have been seldom more laconic than this. Sir Harris Nicolas, author of the first trustworthy Life of Walton, yielding for once to the biographer's weakness for appearances, says that he "received a good, though not, strictly speaking, classical education." Considering that absolutely nothing is known of Walton's schooling, the concession to historical conscientiousness made in the parenthetic "strictly speaking" is amusing. We have the witness of documents in Walton's own handwriting that he could never have been taught even the rudiments of Latin; for he spells the third person singular of the perfect tense of obire, obiet, separate, seperate, and divided, devided. And these documents are printed by Sir Harris himself. After this one finds it hard to conceive what a classical education, loosely speaking, would be. In the list of Walton's books there is none that is not in English. It is enough for us that he contrived to pick up somewhere and somehow a competent mastery of his mother tongue (far harder because seeming easier than Latin), and a diction of persuasive simplicity, capable of dignity where

that was natural and becoming, such as not even the universities can bestow.

It is not known in what year he went to London. It has been conjectured, and with much probability, that he was sent thither to serve his apprenticeship with a relative, Henry Walton, a haberdasher. Of this Henry Walton nothing is known beyond what we are told by his will, and this shows us that he had connections with Staffordshire. That Izaak Walton gave the name of Henry to two sons in succession seems to show some kind of close relation between them and some earlier Henry. But Mr. Nicholls discovered in the records of the Ironmongers' Company for 1617-18 the following entry :

Isaac Walton was made one of the Ironmongers' Company by Thomas Grinsell, citizen and ironmonger." That Walton had relatives of this name appears from a legacy in his will to the widow of his "Cosen Grinsell." On the whole, whatever light is let in by this chink serves only to make the abundant darkness more visible. May there not have been another Isaac, perhaps a cousin, to distinguish himself from whom ours gave to his surname its fantastic spelling? What is certain is that he was already in London in 1619. In that year was published the second edition of a poem, "The Love of Amos and Laura," which, to judge by all that I know of it, the dedication, must happily have been very

soon gathered to its fathers; but it has two points of interest. It is dedicated to Walton by a certain S. P., who may have been the Samuel Purchas of the "Pilgrims;" and in this dedication there are expressions which show that Walton's character was already, in his twentysixth year, marked by the same attractiveness and purity and the same aptness for friendship which endeared him in later life to so many good and eminent men. S. P., after calling him his "more than thrice-beloved friend," tells him that he is the cause that the poem "is now as it is," and that it might have been called his had it been better, but that "No ill thing can be clothed with thy verse." We should infer that Walton had done much in the way of revision, and not only this, but that he was already known, among his friends at least, as a writer of verse himself. It is puzzling, however, that the first edition was published in 1613, when Walton was barely twenty, and that the second differs from the first in a single word only. In the only known copy of this earlier edition (which, to be sure, is otherwise imperfect) the dedication is not to be found. Sir Harris Nicolas suggests that Walton may have revised the poem in manuscript, but it seems altogether unlikely that he should have been called in as a consulting physician at so early an age. More than twenty years later, in the preface to his "Life of Donne,” he

speaks of his "artless pencil," and several times elsewhere alludes to his literary inadequacy. But this deprecation may have been merely a shiver of his habitual modesty, or, as is more likely, a device of his literary adroitness. He certainly must have had considerable practice in the making of verse before he wrote his " Elegy on Donne" (1633), his first published essay in authorship. The versification of this, if sometimes rather stiff, is for the most part firm and not inharmonious. It is easier in its gait than that of Donne in his Satires, and shows the manly influence of Jonson.

Walton, at any rate, in course of time, attained, at least in prose, to something which, if it may not be called style, was a very charming way of writing, all the more so that he has an innocent air of not knowing how it is done. Natural endowment and predisposition may count for nine in ten of the chances of success in this competition; but no man ever achieved, as Walton sometimes did, a simplicity which leaves criticism helpless, by the mere light of nature alone. Nor am I speaking without book. In his "Life of Herbert" he prints a poem of Donne's addressed to Herbert's mother, in which there is allusion to certain hymns. Walton adds a few words which seem to follow each other with as little forethought as the notes of a thrush's song: "These hymns are now lost to us, but doubt

less they were such as they two now sing in Heaven." Now on the inside cover of his Eusebius Walton has written three attempts at this sentence, each of them very far from the concise beauty to which he at last constrained himself. Simplicity, when it is not a careless gift of the Muse, is the last and most painful achievement of conscientious self-denial. He seems also to have had the true literary memory, which stores up the apt or pleasing word for use on occasion. I have noticed more than one instance of it, but one must suffice. In Donne's beautiful poem, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," is this

stanza:

"Dull sublunary lovers' love,

Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because that doth remove
Those things that elemented it."

Walton felt the efficacy of the word "elemented," and laid it by for employment at the first vacancy. I find it more than once in his writings.

Of the personal history of Walton during his life in London we know very little more than that he was living in Fleet Street in 1624, that from 1628 to 1644 he lived in Chancery Lane, and that he was twice married. Perhaps the most important event during all these years in its value to his mind and character was his making the acquaintance of Donne, to whose preaching he was a sedulous listener. This acquaintance