WALTON, ISAAK, author of the Complete Angler, was the son of one Jervis Walton, a yeoman, and was born at Stafford on Aug. 9, 1593. Of his earlier life not much is certainly known. In the year 1694 we find him settled in Fleet street, London, and car rying on business there as a hosier. Iii the end of 1626 he married Rachel Flond, a descendant of archbishop Cranmer. From George Craumer, her uncle, who had been a pupil and friend of Hooker, it is thought likely that Walton derived much of the material for his life of that eminent man. In Aug., 1640, she died in giving birth to a daughter, having before had two sons, neither of whom survived her. In 1643 Walton retired from business with such a modest competence as sufficed for the simple way of life he affected; and in 1647 he married a second time. The lady was Anne Kenn, half sister of the well-known bishop of that name. She bore to him a daughter and two sons, only one of whom lived, and died in 1662, to the great grief of her husband, who survived her many years. He died on Dec. 15, 1683, at the great age of 90, in the house of Dr. Hawkins, his son-in-law, prebendary of Winchester cathedral, and was buried in the vault of that sanctuary.
With the celebrated Dr. John Donne, who died in 1631, Walton, who attended his ministry, had been on terms of affectionate intimacy; and on the publication a' his sermons in 1640 he was induced to preface them with a life of the author. This, his
first publication, was followed by lives of Hooker, sir Henry Wotton, and George Her bert, in succession; the whole four being reissued in a collected edition in 1670. In 1678 the life of his friend, bishop Sanderson, was added. 2he Complete Angler, or templatire Man's Recreation, was published in 1655. A facsimile of the original edition was published in 1675, and, from first to last, more than fifty editions have appeared. To the edition of 1676 a little treatise on fly-fishing was added by Walton's friend, Charles Cotton, in a fishing-house built by whom, on the banks of the river Dove, many of the later days of his happy and blameless life lapsed peacefully in the pursuit of his favor ite recreation. The Complete Angler, as a treatise on the art of angling, may be regarded as in good part obsolete, but it continues and will continue to be read for its charming simplicity of manner, its pastoral freshness and poetry, and the pure, peaceful, and pious spirit which is breathed from its quaint old pages. The lives, though somewhat less widely known, are in their kind not less exquisite and unique. Wordsworth has dedicated to them a beautiful sonnet, in which he speaks of the five saintly names of the subjects of them as Satellites burning in a lucid ring Around meek Walton's heavenly memory.