If Izaak was so eccentric as to go to bed sober on that glorious twenty-
ninth of May, I greatly misjudge him. But he grew elderly. In 1661 he
chronicles the deaths of 'honest Nat. and R. Roe,--they are gone, and
with them most of my pleasant hours, even as a shadow that passeth away,
and returns not.' On April 17, 1662, Walton lost his second wife: she
died at Worcester, probably on a visit to Bishop Morley. In the same
year, the bishop was translated to Winchester, where the palace became
Izaak's home. The Itchen (where, no doubt, he angled with worm) must
have been his constant haunt. He was busy with his Life of Richard
Hooker (1665). The peroration, as it were, was altered and expanded in
1670, and this is but one example of Walton's care of his periods. One
beautiful passage he is known to have rewritten several times, till his
ear was satisfied with its cadences. In 1670 he published his Life of
George Herbert. 'I wish, if God shall be so pleased, that I may be so
happy as to die like him.' In 1673, in a Dedication of the third edition
of _Reliquiae Wottonianae_, Walton alludes to his friendship with a much
younger and gayer man than himself, Charles Cotton (born 1630), the
friend of Colonel Richard Lovelace, and of Sir John Suckling: the
translator of Scarron's travesty of Virgil, and of Montaigne's _Essays_.
Cotton was a roisterer, a man at one time deep in debt, but he was a
Royalist, a scholar, and an angler. The friendship between him and
Walton is creditable to the freshness of the old man and to the kindness
of the younger, who, to be sure, laughed at Izaak's heavily dubbed London
flies. 'In him,' says Cotton, 'I have the happiness to know the
worthiest man, and to enjoy the best and the truest friend any man ever
had.' We are reminded of Johnson with Langton and Topham Beauclerk.
Meanwhile Izaak the younger had grown up, was educated under Dr. Fell at
Christ Church, and made the Grand Tour in 1675, visiting Rome and Venice.
In March 1676 he proceeded M.A. and took Holy Orders. In this year
Cotton wrote his treatise on fly-fishing, to be published with Walton's