t
copies, as (p. 88) 'Fordig' for 'Fordidg,' (p. 152) 'Pudoch' for
'Pudock.' The appearance of the work was advertised in _The Perfect
Diurnal_ (May 9-16), and in No. 154 of _The Mercurius Politicus_ (May 19-
26), also in an almanack for 1654. Izaak, or his publisher Marriott,
cunningly brought out the book at a season when men expect the Mayfly.
Just a month before, Oliver Cromwell had walked into the House of
Commons, in a plain suit of black clothes, with grey stockings. His
language, when he spoke, was reckoned unparliamentary (as it undeniably
was), and he dissolved the Long Parliament. While Marriott was
advertising Walton's work, Cromwell was making a Parliament of Saints,
'faithful, fearing God, and hating covetousness.' This is a good
description of Izaak, but he was not selected. In the midst of
revolutions came _The Compleat Angler_ to the light, a possession for
ever. Its original purchasers are not likely to have taken a hand in
Royalist plots or saintly conventicles. They were peaceful men. A
certain Cromwellian trooper, Richard Franck, was a better angler than
Walton, and he has left to us the only contemporary and contemptuous
criticism of his book: to this we shall return, but anglers, as a rule,
unlike Franck, must have been for the king, and on Izaak's side in
controversy.

Walton brought out a second edition in 1655. He rewrote the book, adding
more than a third, suppressing _Viator_, and introducing _Venator_. New
plates were added, and, after the manner of the time, commendatory
verses. A third edition appeared in 1661, a fourth (published by Simon
Gape, not by Marriott) came out in 1664, a fifth in 1668 (counting Gape's
of 1664 as a new edition), and in 1676, the work, with treatises by
Venables and Charles Cotton, was given to the world as _The Universal
Angler_. Five editions in twelve years is not bad evidence of Walton's
popularity. But times now altered. Walton is really an Elizabethan: he
has the quaint freshness, the apparently artless music of language of the
great age. He is a friend of 'country contents': no lover of the town,
no keen student of urban ways and mundane men. A new taste, modelled on
that of the wits of Louis XIV., had come in: we are in the period of
Dryden, and approaching that of Pope.

There was no new edition of Walton till Moses Browne (by Johnson's
desire) published him, with 'improvements,' in 1750. Then came Hawkins's
edition in 1760. Johnson s