aid of Hawkins, 'Why, ma'am, I believe him to
be an honest man at the bottom; but, to be sure, he is penurious, and he
is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality, and a
tendency to savageness, that cannot easily be defended.'

This was hardly the editor for Izaak! However, Hawkins, probably by aid
of Oldys the antiquary (as Mr. Marston shows), laid a good foundation for
a biography of Walton. Errors he made, but Sir Harris Nicolas has
corrected them. Johnson himself reckoned Walton's _Lives_ as 'one of his
most favourite books.' He preferred the life of Donne, and justly
complained that Walton's story of Donne's vision of his absent wife had
been left out of a modern edition. He explained Walton's friendship with
persons of higher rank by his being 'a great panegyrist.'

The eighteenth century, we see, came back to Walton, as the nineteenth
has done. He was precisely the author to suit Charles Lamb. He was
reprinted again and again, and illustrated by Stoddart and others. Among
his best editors are Major (1839), 'Ephemera' (1853), Nicolas (1836,
1860), and Mr. Marston (1888).

The only contemporary criticism known to me is that of Richard Franck,
who had served with Cromwell in Scotland, and, not liking the aspect of
changing times, returned to the north, and fished from the Esk to
Strathnaver. In 1658 he wrote his _Northern Memoirs_, an itinerary of
sport, heavily cumbered by dull reflections and pedantic style. Franck,
however, was a practical angler, especially for salmon, a fish of which
Walton knew nothing: he also appreciated the character of the great
Montrose. He went to America, wrote a wild cosmogonic work, and _The
Admirable and Indefatigable Adventures of the Nine Pious Pilgrims_ (one
pilgrim catches a trout!) (London, 1708). The _Northern Memoirs_ of 1658
were not published till 1694. Sir Walter Scott edited a new issue, in
1821, and defended Izaak from the strictures of the salmon-fisher. Izaak,
says Franck, 'lays the stress of his arguments upon other men's
observations, wherewith he stuffs his indigested octavo; so brings
himself under the angler's censure and the common calamity of a plagiary,
to be pitied (poor man) for his loss of time, in scribbling and
transcribing other men's notions. . . . I remember in Stafford, I urged
his own argument upon him, that pickerel weed of itself breeds pickerel
(pike).' Franck proposed a rational theory, 'which my Compleat Angler no
s