The fortunes of the book,the fata libelli,have been traced by Mr.Westwood.There are several misprints (later corrected)in the earliest copies,as (p.88)'Fordig'for 'Fordidg,'(p.152)'Pudoch'for 'Pudock.'The appearance of the work was advertised in The Perfect Diurnal (May 9-16),and in No.154of The Mercurius Politicus (May 19-26),also in an almanack for 1654.Izaak,or his publisher Marriott,cunningly brought out the book at a season when men expect the Mayfly.Just a month before,Oliver Cromwell had walked into the House of Commons,in a plain suit of black clothes,with grey stockings.His language,when he spoke,was reckoned unparliamentary (as it undeniably was),and he dissolved the Long Parliament.While Marriott was advertising Walton's work,Cromwell was making a Parliament of Saints,'faithful,fearing God,and hating covetousness.'This is a good description of Izaak,but he was not selected.In the midst of revolutions came The Compleat Angler to the light,a possession for ever.Its original purchasers are not likely to have taken a hand in Royalist plots or saintly conventicles.They were peaceful men.A certain Cromwellian trooper,Richard Franck,was a better angler than Walton,and he has left to us the only contemporary and contemptuous criticism of his book:to this we shall return,but anglers,as a rule,unlike Franck,must have been for the king,and on Izaak's side in controversy.
Walton brought out a second edition in 1655.He rewrote the book,adding more than a third,suppressing Viator,and introducing Venator.New plates were added,and,after the manner of the time,commendatory verses.A third edition appeared in 1661,a fourth (published by Simon Gape,not by Marriott)came out in 1664,a fifth in 1668(counting Gape's of 1664as a new edition),and in 1676,the work,with treatises by Venables and Charles Cotton,was given to the world as The Universal Angler.Five editions in twelve years is not bad evidence of Walton's popularity.But times now altered.Walton is really an Elizabethan:he has the quaint freshness,the apparently artless music of language of the great age.He is a friend of 'country contents':no lover of the town,no keen student of urban ways and mundane men.Anew taste,modelled on that of the wits of Louis XIV.had come in:we are in the period of Dryden,and approaching that of Pope.