whom the last died in 1641—­his wife, and his mother-in-law.  In 1644 he left Chancery Lane, and probably retired from trade.  He was, of course, a Royalist.  Speaking of the entry of the Scots, who came, as one of them said, ‘for the goods,—­and chattels of the English,’ he remarks, ‘I saw and suffered by it.’ {2} He also mentions that he ‘saw’ shops shut by their owners till Laud should be put to death, in January 1645.  In his Life of Sanderson, Walton vouches for an anecdote of ‘the knowing and conscientious King,’ Charles, who, he says, meant to do public penance for Strafford’s death, and for the abolishing of Episcopacy in Scotland.  But the condition, ’peaceable possession of the Crown,’ was not granted to Charles, nor could have been granted to a prince who wished to reintroduce Bishops in Scotland.  Walton had his information from Dr. Morley.  On Nov. 25, 1645, Walton probably wrote, though John Marriott signed, an Address to the Reader, printed, in 1646, with Quarles’s Shepherd’s Eclogues.  The piece is a little idyll in prose, and ‘angle, lines, and flies’ are not omitted in the description of ‘the fruitful month of May,’ while Pan is implored to restore Arcadian peace to Britannia, ’and grant that each honest shepherd may again sit under his own vine and fig-tree, and feed his own flock,’ when the King comes, no doubt.  ‘About’ 1646 Walton married Anne, half-sister of Bishop Ken, a lady ‘of much Christian meeknesse.’  Sir Harris Nicolas thinks that he only visited Stafford occasionally, in these troubled years.  He mentions fishing in ‘Shawford brook’; he was likely to fish wherever there was water, and the brook flowed through land which, as Mr. Marston shows, he acquired about 1656.  In 1650 a child was born to Walton in Clerkenwell; it died, but another, Isaac, was born in September 1651.  In 1651 he published the Reliquiae Wottonianae, with a Memoir of Sir Henry Wotton.  The knight had valued Walton’s company as a cure for ’those splenetic vapours that are called hypochondriacal.’

Worcester fight was on September 3, 1651; the king was defeated, and fled, escaping, thanks to a stand made by Wogan, and to the loyalty of Mistress Jane Lane, and of many other faithful adherents.  A jewel of Charles’s, the lesser George, was preserved by Colonel Blague, who intrusted it to Mr. Barlow of Blore Pipe House, in Staffordshire.  Mr. Barlow gave it to Mr. Milward, a Royalist prisoner in Stafford, and he, in turn, intrusted it to Walton, who managed to convey it to Colonel Blague in the Tower.  The colonel escaped, and the George was given back to the king.  Ashmole, who tells the story, mentions Walton as ’well beloved of all good men.’  This incident is, perhaps, the only known adventure in the long life of old Izaak.  The peaceful angler, with a royal jewel in his pocket, must have encountered many dangers on the highway.  He was a man of sixty when he published his Compleat Angler in 1653, and so secured immortality.  The quiet