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Waltoniana - Inedited Remains in Verse and Prose of Izaak Walton by Izaak Walton
page 4 of 59 (06%)
I too unworthy of so great a blisse:
These harsh-tun'd lines I here to thee commend,
Thou being cause it is now as it is:
For hadst thou held thy tongue, by silence might
These have beene buried in obliuious night.

"If they were pleasing, I would call them thine,
And disauow my title to the verse:
But being bad, I needes must call them mine.
No ill thing can be cloathed in thy verse.
Accept them then, and where I have offended,
Rase thou it out, and let it be amended.

"S.P." [2]

What poems Walton wrote in his youth, we have now no means of knowing; it
has not been discovered that any have been printed, unless we adopt the
theory advocated by Mr. Singer,[3] and by a writer in the "Retrospective
Review,"[4] that the poem of _Thealma and Clearchus_, which he published
in the last year of his life, as a posthumous fragment of his relation
John Chalkhill, was really a juvenile work of his own. Some plausibility
is lent to this notion by the fact that Walton speaks of the author with
so much reticence and reserve in his preface to the volume, and also that
in introducing two of Chalkhill's songs into the "Complete Angler," he
does not bestow on them the customary words of commendation. This theory
has been rebutted by others, who assert that Walton was of too truthful
and guileless a nature to resort to such an artifice. We confess that we
are unable to see anything dishonest in the adoption, as a pseudonym, of
the name of a deceased friend, or anything more than Walton appears to
have done on another occasion when he published his two letters on "Love
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