. Best known as the author of The Compleat Angler, he also wrote a number of short biographies which have been collected under the title of Walton's Lives.
Walton was born at Stafford
; the register of his baptism
gives his father's name as Gervase
. His father, who was an innkeeper as well as a landlord of a tavern
, died before Izaak was three. His mother then married another innkeeper by the name of Bourne, who would later run the Swan in Stafford.
He settled in London
where he began trading as an ironmonger in a small shop in the upper story of Thomas Gresham
's Royal Burse or Exchange
in Cornhill.
The great secretary of Nature and all learning, Sir Francis Bacon.
I have laid aside business, and gone a-fishing.
Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learnt.
As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.
I shall stay him no longer than to wish him a rainy evening to read this following discourse; and that if he be an honest angler, the east wind may never blow when he goes a-fishing.
Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so: I mean, with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice
Doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant that it will prove to be, like virtue, a reward to itself.
Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element are made for wise men to contemplate, and for fools to pass by without consideration.
You will find angling to be like the virtue of humility, which has a calmness of spirit and a world of other blessings attending upon it.
I remember that a wise friend of mine did usually say, "That which is everybody's business is nobody's business."