THE COMPLEAT ANGLER.*
The Compleat Angler seems to grow in favour. The more restless and hurried the age, the more it seems to value this classic of quiet life. Nine years ago Mr. R. B. Marston, a notable name in angling literature, edited the hundredth edition, to which he gave the appropriate name of The Lea and Dove, and now we have reached the hundred and seventeenth. Seventeen editions sufficed for the hundred and fifty years that followed Walton's first publication, and now they are enough for only nine ! Meanwhile the early issues have become worth their weight in gold, sometimes, indeed, much more. The first edition sold a few months ago for £415, an • The Complaat Angler. By Isaak Walton and Charles Cotton. muted, with an Introduction, by iiiohard Le Gallienne. Illustrated by Edmund H. New. London 1 John Lane.
advance of £105 on the top price reached before (March 4th, 1891). Even a third edition fetched £37 last year.
Mr. Le Gallienne does not find much that is new to say- To do that, indeed, passes any man's ingenuity, and it would not be fair to blame him for it. But we may regret that he is not more in sympathy with his author. That he has never oast a line, as he tells us, may be excused; it is his mis- fortune, we may say, rather than his fault. (But he must not claim Mr. Andrew Lang as being in a similar plight. Mr. Lang chooses to pose as a "duffer," but that is only his fun.) But it is a real pity that he should feel, and take pains to show that he feels, something like contempt for what he calls Walton's "fantastic piety." "A saint," he says, " is, of necessity, somewhat inhuman ;" and he adds, " There always seems a spice of the devil in any form of skill, and we don't readily think of the good man being clever as well. It seems a sort of wickedness in him somehow." The proof that he gives to show that Walton was not quite so artless as he seems, is that the sentence about Donne's hymns (" These are now lost to us ; but doubtless they are such as they two now sing in heaven ") did not take its present shape till after two or three attempts. This seems a strange thing, that a man may not do his best to give the finest form to his thought without some loss of simplicity. But, in any case, how incongruous to all that we know of Walton is this kind of writing ! There is too much of the fin-de-siecle—shall we say decadence P—about Mr. Le Gallienne to allow him to be the ideal editor of such a book. In restating the facts of Walton's biography he has done his work sufficiently well. That Walton was an ironmonger by trade is not quite certain. The description of "Citizen and Ironmonger" nowadays proves nothing. It is quite possible that there is not a single ironmonger in the Company that bears the name. Only some of the smaller Companies retain a close connection with the trade which they profess. Had this process of dissociation begun as early as Walton's time!' It would be interesting if some expert in these matters would give us an answer. Chalmers (Biographical Dic- tionary, s.v.) says that when he lived in Chancery Lane his occupation was described as that of "a sempeter or milliner," and conjectures that Walton was the sempeter and his wife the milliner. Chalmers does not give any authority. It is curious that in the "Angler's Calendar" which concludes this volume we have under the date of August 9th, " Izaak Walton, mercer in London," died. We may add that if he was an ironmonger when he had his shop in the "Royal Burse" (as he did up to 1624), he must have been much cramped for room, for shops in the Burse were but 74 ft. long by 5 ft. wide. A man might be a sempster such a shop, but hardly an ironmonger.
The "Angler's Calendar" which we have just mentioned is a good piece of work, though, of course, it admits of im- provement. One useful feature is that it gives the varying " close times" of the different salmon and trout rivers in the -United Kingdom. Other information of this kind might have been added, as, for example, that from March 15th to June 15th is a close time in English rivers for "coarse fish." It is ridiculous to be contemptuous of these kinds of fish, for it was with these that Walton chiefly concerned himself. He has much to say, for instance, about the chub, and it might have been as well to add this fish to the pike— itself a " coarse " kind—of which we are told that it affords the only " sporting angling" in December. The writer of this can assure the compiler of the Calendar that chub fishing in winter, when the water happens to be in good trim, full but not flooded, coloured but not thick, is excellent sport. In the list of "Books Referred to, &c.," the editor accepts a predecessor's error in describing the Pliny of the Natural History as "Pliny, Junior."
Of Mr. Edmund H. New's illustrations we cannot speak too highly. Here, certainly, there is no want of sympathy. Their tone and temper are altogether in harmony with the book. The artist has followed the angler's routes ; where the surroundings have remained substantially the same he gives us the present; where, as is too often the case, all is changed he goes back to the past as it has been preserved for WI in old pictures and prints. It is difficult to single out any for praise where all are so pleasing, but we may mention ".Shawford Brook,"* Theobald's Park,'
and " Milldale." The fish are admirable. We have never seen better.
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