WALTON’S “The Complete Angler” demonstrates that in literature as in everything else “love is the fulfilling of the law” of success. It has a charm for thousands who never fish at all, because it was written by a man who so loved fishing that what he wrote of it became a masterpiece,—for the time being the most important thing in the world, capable of distracting the reader’s attention from everything else. Who, in reading the peaceful pages of Walton, ever stops to think that they were written in a troublesome world—the world of bloody conflict between Puritan and Cavalier and first published in the very year in which Cromwell drove out the “Rump” Parliament? When the most peaceful of all English books comes from such a time of contention and “babblement,” it puts to shame all who complain that their generation denies them the quiet necessary for perfect work.

  Walton was born at Stafford, England, August 9th, 1593. For many years he kept a shop in London, but when the civil war began, he gave up business and retired to his birthplace where he bought land and devoted his leisure to fishing and reading. He died December 15th, 1683, aged ninety years. Besides “The Complete Angler,” he wrote lives of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, Herbert, and Sanderson.