Originally published in The Leisure Hour (Religious Tract Society) vol.1 #17 (22 Apr 1852).
Perhaps a scene of greater bustle, compressed in a space so narrow, could hardly anywhere be found, than may be daily witnessed about noon, and for some hours afterwards, in the immediate vicinity of Temple-bar. What a host of jostling way-farers on the pavement—like motes in a sunbeam—pressing on, as if heedless of one another's presence, exhibiting very plainly curious specimens of mental abstraction, and affording inexhaustible materials for speculation on their thoughts and schemes. How the crowd stops, swells, gurgles, at the corner of Chancery-lane, like a dammed up mill-stream, while some gigantic wagon or awkward omnibus impedes the passage, and leaves eager walkers on both sides like people on the shores of a river waiting for a ferry-boat. And, then, how confused is the assemblage of vehicles in the middle of Fleet-street, rattling with noisy earnestness and terrific speed, till, like a huge mass of machinery, it overdoes itself, a piece gets out of order, and the whole is stopped. And now what perplexity and impatience! Omnibuses, carts, carriages, cabs, coaches, barrows, locomotive advertisers, and other indescribable things, become locked—anything but lovingly—in each other's embrace; some elegant chariot striving to get free from the arms of a brewer's dray, or some aristocratic "Clarence" tearing itself from the rude clasp of a plebeian "Hansom." A little opening made, and no leaders of a forlorn hope ever more boldly rush into the breach, than do barristers with horse-hair wigs, and attorneys with blue bags, and bankers' clerks with leather cases full of bills, plunge into the vacant space, and thread their way through its perilous windings.
Are there any shadows of bygone times and men departed, bringing up memorials of the solemn, romantic, picturesque and tender, meeting us amidst this scene of bustle? Indeed there are. If there be no spot more strikingly expressive of the present, there is not one in London more richly and variously redolent of the past. Here we are in the midst of the old inns of court, which arose in the infancy of the legal profession in England, and which were in the full bloom of their quaint dramatic splendour in the reign of James I. Under the narrow gateway, nearly opposite Chancery-lane, you enter the Temple, now the home of lawyers, once the abode of knights, who, in coats of mail and cross-decked mantles, reined their steeds in gaudy procession along this thoroughfare; or bowed their knees on the pavement of the famous round church, whose architecture places us in the very midst of the thirteenth century. Yonder house, with some traces of antiquity lingering on it still, was once, as the inscription on it imports, the palace of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey; and one sees bluff Harry and the Cardinal issuing forth: from long since vanished portals on their way to see the setting of the city watch on Midsummer Eve. And is not that Temple-bar itself?—not the original Temple-bar, it is true, but yet a building carrying us back to 1670, the work of Sir Christopher Wren, and associated with many city scenes since then, full of the antique spirit; especially that oft-repeated one, now sinking into desuetude, when kings and queens of England and their marshals paused there, and knocked for entrance, asking for admission from my lord mayor. It tells of rebellions and of cruel punishments, when spiked heads were the grim adornments of the gate; and leads us to thank Almighty God for the more peaceful and humane habits of the present day.
But it is not our intention here to call back the shades of knights templars, or great lawyers, or city functionaries; no, nor yet to walk and talk with the spirits of the famous wits, from Ben Jonson to Addison, who frequented the house now turned into Child's bank; nor yet to step in and look at Goldsmith, in his lodgings within Brick-court, or Johnson, at No. 1, Middle Temple-lane; that we may do some future day. Our thoughts are now fixed on one who was far removed in habit from men of the sword, gentlemen of the bar, and Civic officials; but who, though neither a professed poet or philosopher, had in him some elements of both. We are thinking of old Isaak Walton, the immortal angler.
This seems hardly the place for meeting him. We associate his name with silvery rivers and green meadows, trout streams and shady banks. How distinctly does his form, in the costume of the seventeenth century, appear before us, and how smilingly does his open countenance, with flowing hair, give us friendly greeting as we ramble alongside of the Lea, near Hoddesdon. And then in Dovedale—the romantic Dovedale—as we once wandered through its rock-girt and tree-crested avenues, and sat down among the rushes and watched the stream, and the dead leaves that we threw into it, to see them float round the eddies—did we not see Isaak himself, with rod and line and basket; and, as evening drew on, and the hills became a dark blue, and a deep shade gathered over the waters, did we not seem to hear him bidding good night to the scene of his day's sport, saying, "Go thy way, little Dove; thou art the prettiest of rivers, and the fullest of fish, that I ever saw?" But, after all, with the neighbourhood of Temple-bar, Isaak Walton had more to do than with either the Lea or the Dove. It was here he lived. We have no traces of his house remaining now, but we can identify the site. There lies before us an old print of part of Fleet-street, showing the end of Chancery-lane—a representation which we give at the beginning of this paper. It reminds us more of a street in old Paris, or Frankfort, or some Flemish city, than of anything to be found in the vicinity now. There is a tall narrow house of five stories at the corner, with bay windows carved and adorned in front, the edges of the stories by odd looking corbels like caryatides, and the old dwelling crowned with a thatch roof. The second, a narrower strip of building, is a little modern; then comes the third, lower and broader than the first, with windows along the whole front. Here lived Isaak Walton.
Sir John Hawkins found an old deed, dated 1624, in which this house is deseribed as abutting on a house bearing the sign of the "Harrow," and as being in the joint occupation of Isaak Walton and John Mason, hosier; whence he concludes that half a shop was sufficient for the business of Walton. This seems to make some critical antiquaries rather angry. They consider Isaak was a man of more worldly importance than this would indicate. He was a Hamburgh merchant, say they, not needing much frontage, but letting a part of it off to a hosier, while he retained the whole dwelling-house. Be it so; for it appears not unlikely that Walton was above a little shopkeeper, since he had alliances and friendship with the great and wealthy. Walton took this house, we may imagine, in consequence of his intending to get married, for in 1623 he began, he says, a happy affinity with the family of his first wife, Rachael Floud, a descendant of Archbishop Cranmer, to whom he was married in 1626.
Walton was born at Stafford, on the 9th of August, 1593, and it is conjectured that he served his apprenticeship, as a hosier, to a relation of his of the same name, in Whitechapel. Shadows of the boy Walton—belonging to a time when London apprentices were still a distinct and recognised class, though less boisterous and ungovernable than they had been—may therefore flit before our eyes the next time we go into that region of butchers' shops; but it is in Fleet-street, No. 3 from Chancery-lane, that we get our first distinct view of the genial fisherman. He did not publish his "Angler" there, nor any of his books; yet with the hosiery or Hamburgh trade, we doubt not, he associated, when a young man, not only his love for the rod and line, but an inkling after old books; and not only visited Mr. Margrave, who dwelt among the booksellers in St. Paul's churchyard—or Mr. John Stubbs, near to the "Swan," in Golden-lane, to purchase tackle—or went out on fine May mornings for a fishing excursion in the neighbourhood of Ware—or snatched a few hours upon a summer day to throw in a line from London-bridge for the "leather-mouthed" roach, which, he says, were there "the largest and fattest in this nation"—but sat down many a long winter night, with his wife Rachael, conning black-letter books of history, divinity, and poetry. And we may well fancy that though none of his own works issued from the press while he lived in Fleet-street, there were in that old house growing up within him some of the curious thoughts he expressed in his "Angler," for the book is an image of himself—just a revelation of the man Walton—as his brotherin-law, Robert Floud, a frequent visitant no doubt at Fleet-street, used afterwards to tell him:—
"This book is so like you, and you like it,
For harmless mirth, expression, art, and wit,
That I protest ingenuously, 'tis true,
I love this mirth, art, wit, the book and you."
Most probably, too, in this very house he began to collect materials for his charming "Life of Master Richard Hooker;" for George Cranmer, his wife's uncle, with whom at the time we refer to he must have been on intimate terms, had been one of Hooker's pupils. It requires no great stretch of imagination to see and overhear Walton and Cranmer talking about old times, the latter telling the former of the great divine, his manner of life, his learning and meekness, his devotion and charity, and the former putting down, from the lips of the latter, in the thick cramped handwriting with which his autographs have made us familiar, facts and observations which became the germ of this invaluable piece of biography.
We are also within a few paces of another dwelling, in which the author and angler domiciled. Ten years after he came to Fleet-street, he went to live a few doors up Chancery-lane; there two sons were born, and his poor wife died, in 1640, after giving birth to an infant daughter. The same year Walton published his "Life of Dr. Donne," prefixed to the sermons of that eloquent divine. He also is one of the genii loci belonging to the region hereabouts, and his shadow meets us in company with his illustrious parishioner, for he was vicar of the parish of St. Dunstan, to which the house we have noticed belongs. We can see the vicar, with cropped hair, open forehead, arched eyebrows, full eyes, handsome nose and lips, thick moustache, peaked beard, and high ruffed collar, sitting in the brown oak parlour of his friend; and then we go with Walton to the chureh of St. Dunstan, when Donne preached from the text, "To God the Lord belong the issues of death." "Many that then saw his tears," says Walton, "and heard his faint and hollow Voice, professed they thought the text prophetically chosen, and that Dr. Donne had preached his own funeral sermon." The good man was well fit to die, for Walton tells us he said: "Though of myself I have nothing to present to him but sin and misery, yet I know he looks not upon me now as I am of myself, but as I am in my Saviour, and hath given me even at this present time some testimonies by his Holy Spirit that I am of the number of the elect; I am therefore full of inexpressible joy, and shall die in peace." In anticipation of his death, the worthy divine did an odd thing with a pious intent, which had in it a dash of quaintness rather peculiar even in that quaint age. "A monument being resolved on," Walton tells us, "Dr. Donne sent for a carver to make him in wood the figure of an urn, giving him directions for the compass and height of it, and to bring with it a board of the just height of his body. These being got, then without delay a choice painter was got, to be in readiness to draw his picture, which was taken as followeth: Several charcoal fires being first made in his large study, he brought with him into that place his winding-sheet in his hand, and having put off all his clothes, had this sheet put on him, and so tied with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed, as dead bodies are usually fitted to be shrouded and put into their coffin or grave. Upon this urn he thus stood, with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned inside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like face, which was purposely turned toward the east, from whence he expected the second coming of his and our Saviour, Jesus. In this posture he was drawn at his just height, and when the picture was fully finished, he caused it to be set by his bedside, where it continued and became his hourly object till his death, and was then given to his dearest friend and executor, Dr. Henry King, then chief residentiary of St. Paul's, who caused him to be thus carved in one entire piece of white marble, as it now stands in that church."
This strange sort of monument is preserved, with other relics of old St. Paul's, in the crypt of the present cathedral. Just after the picture was drawn as above described, Donne "sent for several of his most considerable friends, of whom he took a solemn and deliberate farewell, commending to their considerations some sentences useful for the regulation of their lives, and then dismissed them, as good Jacob did his sons, with a spiritual benediction." We enter the bed-chamber, cold and stately, with wainscot furniture and tester bed, and there see the faithful and affectionate Walton, whose soul was formed to be an altar for the fire of friendship, reverently bending over his loved and honoured minister. He tells us of |unknown mournful friends who repaired to the tomb of "Donne, as Alexander the Great did to the grave of the famous Achilles, and strewed it with an abundance of curious and costly flowers." We are ready to think he was himself one of the number. How beautiful the reflection he makes over the sepulchre in old St. Paul's: "He was earnest and unwearied in the search of knowledge, with which his vigorous soul is now satisfied, and employed in a continual praise of that God who first breathed it into his active body, that body which once was a temple of the Holy Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust. But," he adds, with sublime simplicity—the noble fruit of Christian faith—"I shall see it reanimated."
Walton did not remain long in the parish after Donne had gone to heaven. His many bereavements there threw sad associations over the place. He could not read, and go a-fishing pleasantly as he had done. His losses made him look at things in the neighbourhood through a melancholy medium, which darkly tinged all he saw; so he took leave of the place, and we lose sight of him for awhile altogether. He goes off into darkness and silence, whither the antiquaries follow and look after him in vain, till years after his shadowy presence brightens upon us somewhere about Clerkenwell.
Troublous times came over England in 1640, indeed had long before come over it, but now burst into a storm. London was often in fierce commotion. King and parliament, parliament and royal army, agitated the citizens from Temple-bar to Whitechapel. Men plunged into political strife, felt with vehemence, and acted with energy. Out of all this the shadow of our angler seems to glide away in quest of nature's peace and loveliness. He was no party man, and had friends whom he retained on both sides, though his sympathies were doubtless with the royalists; and, indeed, we find him entrusted with one of the badges of the order of the garter—the lesser George, as it is called, which Charles II had delivered up to a friend for safe keeping after the battle of Worcester. "It was," says Ashmole, a friend of Walton's, "strangely preserved by Colonel Blague, one of that king's dispersed attendants, who resigned it for safety to the wife of Mr. Barlow, of Blarepipe House, in Staffordshire, where he took sanctuary; from whom Robert Milward, esq., received and gave it into the hands of Mr. Isaak Walton, (all loyalists). It came again into Blague's possession, then prisoner in the Tower, whence making his escape, he restored it to king Charles II." We suppose Walton gave or sent the treasure to the captive in the Tower. The quiet man of the angle was trustworthy and unsuspected. "He was well known," says his friend in the herald's office, "and as well beloved of all good men."
Walton mentions Ashmole in the "Complete Angler," and takes us down to his house at Lambeth, near London, where he shows us the antiquary's curiosities, abounding in specimens of natural history—to the heart's delight of the author, who pores over them there with unutterable interest. He enumerates "the hog-fish, the dog-fish, the dolphin, the coney-fish, the parrot-fish, the shark, the poison-fish, the sword-fish, and other incredible fish;" also the salamander and bird of paradise, snakes and solan geese, not forgetting the barnacles, which were said to grow on trees within shells like eggs, and then to drop off, and come out, soon to fledge and take their place with winged creatures—all of which is duly illustrated in a large wood-cut in Gerard's Herbal. In such recreations we can see Walton and Ashmole seeking relief from the angry storms of politics and war.
After leaving Chancery-lane, Walton married Anne Ken, half-sister of the nonjuring bishop of that name—a circumstance which links him with another of the celebrities of that age, though Ken did not perform the act which has made his memory so famous in English history till after Walton's death. The resistance of James II's commands by the five bishops, who were imprisoned in the Tower, and afterwards so triumphantly acquitted, of whom Ken was one, did not occur till 1687. Walton died in 1683. In his will he deviseth to his son-in-law, Doctor Hawkins, and his wife, his title and right of or in part of a house and shop in Paternoster-row, which he held by lease from the Lord Bishop of London for about fifty years to come. This lease he took in 1662, and the house was called the Cross Keys. Though he resided about that time very much with his friend Dr. Morley, then recently made Bishop of Winchester, whose palace was in Cheyne-walk, Chelsea, yet his name thus certainly becomes associated with the realm of the booksellers; and we think of Isaak in Paternoster-row; as, indeed, independently of any local connexion through residence or property, we could not help being reminded of him there, since his popular works bring before us the shadow of his presence, looking down upon us as they do so invitingly from the shelves of every bibliopolist's shop.
We are no lovers of angling: for, beside thinking there is cruelty in the sport, we believe we can better employ our time even in the way of recreation, though this is a daring thing to say in the presence of Walton's shade, whose portrait, lying before us as we write, seems to knit its brows while we pen the words. Yet, for all that, we love Walton's book. There is a soft, gentle, benignant spirit pervading the whole, which irresistibly soothes us, when harassed with business and wearied with toil. We apprehend, that if we were to try to reduce to practice the fishing rules of the renowned author, we should, like Washington Irving, hook ourselves instead of the fish, and tangle our line in every tree, lose our bait, break our rod, and give up the attempt in despair, confessing that "angling is something like poetry—a man must be born to it." But reading his book, not only under the green trees, but by the fire-side, and even in an omnibus going home from the city at eventide, has often refreshed us like the murmur of the brooks, and the fragrance of the cowslips, and the song of the early birds he so sweetly talks of. And if, perchance, we be careful and troubled about many things, and wonder how we are to obtain what is needful in this crowded world, so full of competition, it does us good to read such a passage as this: "When I would beget content and increase confidence in the power and wisdom and providence of Almighty God, I will walk the meadows by some gliding stream, and there contemplate the lilies that take no care, and those very many other little living creatures that are not only created, but fed (man knows not how) by the goodness of the God of nature, and therefore trust in him."
But much as we admire his "Angler," we admire, in some respects, his "Lives" still more, for though there are sentiments expressed and opinions indicated, with which we do not agree, we have brought before us portraitures of piety, especially in the characters of Hooker, Donne, and Herbert, which may well awaken our Christian sympathies, and stimulate us to holy imitation. But we are losing the shadow of the man among his books. We can trace him no further. In his last days he lived away from London with his son-in-law. He lies buried in Winchester cathedral.
We come back to Temple-bar, and pass under its dark shadow at the midnight hour. The moon is up, and little stars are opening their eyes and smiling over the city of sleepers. The streets are now still, very still, almost like the disentombed Pompeii. A few hours have made a mighty difference. The busy, noisy, bustling crowds have disappeared and melted away in silence. So, in a few years, writer and reader will disappear, and sleep the long sleep in the land of silence, where Walton, and Donne, and Ashmole, and all the rest of that generation, have been for nearly two centuries. We shall leave no shadow behind us, such as some of them have done. The most we can expect is that our children, perhaps our children's children, will sometimes think of us, and perchance image to themselves their ancestor from the old portrait of us we may leave behind. Where then will the still living and conscious spirit be? Will it be in that glorious world of which Walton used to think in the dead hour of night, as he walked in some favourite grove? "He that at midnight, when the very labourer sleeps securely, should hear as I have very often, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say, Lord, what music hast thou provided for the saints in heaven, when thou affordest bad men such music on earth."