SOURCE: Goldman, Marcus Selden. “Izaak Walton and The Arte of Angling, 1577.” In Studies in Honor of T. W. Baldwin, edited by Don Cameron Allen, pp. 185-204. Urbana, III.: University of Illinois Press, 1958.

In the essay below, Goldman investigates similarities between the annonymous The Arte of Angling and Walton's The Compleat Angler.

The Rev. Dr. George Washington Bethune, its first American editor, was, beyond question, one of the wisest and most learned of the many wise and learned men who, in the course of three centuries, have provided Walton's masterpiece with appreciative commentary and elucidative notes. Everywhere evident, his wisdom and learning are nowhere more impressive than in those pages of the “Bibliographical Preface” to the first American Edition¹ in which he deals with the sources, known, putative, and merely possible, of the The Compleat Angler. Equipped as he was with a perfect command of the classical languages and...