THE

COMPLETE ANGLER:

2457

OR,

THE CONTEMPLATIVE MAN'S

RECREATION.

BY IZAAK WALTON.

BEING A

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

LONDON:

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

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

must have been other risks to which The

Complete Angler was exposed, not much less fatal, though of far gentler origin, than the odium theologicum itself.

Such a volume as Walton's must have commended itself at once and infallibly to contemplative and religiously disposed persons, whether members or not of the gentle craft for whom, ostensibly, it was intended. This was a book, not to be placed in the safe companionship of worthy but unread books, but if the owner were a bond-fide Angler, to be pushed into corners of fishing baskets, crammed into well-filled pockets, hugged over running stream or deep and shady pool, thrown down anywhere in the excitement of a bite, and exposed to all the many perils by land and water known to beset the small properties of that class of men who "hate