Fac-simile reprint of the first edition, published in 1653

LONDON:

ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.

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PREFACE.

In the standard prose literature of England there are few books which have had a wider popularity than The Complete Angler of honest, gentle, thoughtful Izaak Walton, and few of which it is more difficult to obtain a copy of the first edition. Although not a work to come to an untimely end through such polemical influences as may safely be assumed to have put out of the way many a copy of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress when in its youth,-though the odium theologicum can have had but small part or lot in the reduction of Walton's first edition to so small a remnant as is known to exist,-still there