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 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