The fortunes of the book,the fata libelli,have been traced by Mr.Westwood.There are several misprints (later corrected)in the earliest 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.154of 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 ****** 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 1664as 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.Anew 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 said 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 1658he 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 1658were 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 sooner deliberated,but dropped his argument,and leaves Gesner to defend it,so huffed away.