Fishy anniversary …

… It Has Hooked Generations of Fishermen | Izaak Walton | The Compleat Angler | By H. George Fletcher - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Walton [was] an amiable and modest man of pious interests, for whom "Study to be quiet" (1 Thessalonians 4:11) was a favored motto. A royalist profoundly saddened by the English Civil War and the Commonwealth, he worked as an ironmonger in London near St. Dunstan's, the future parish of Ebenezer Scrooge. Walton's minister was John Donne, whom he attended in Donne's final illness and recalled with a biography. Married and widowed twice (only two of his 10 children outlived him), Walton was just shy of his 60th birthday when his book appeared, and he lived on for three more decades. His spelling was emblematic of his age, which was indifferent about such things. Isaac at birth and Isaac on his gravestone in Winchester Cathedral, he regularly signed himself simply Iz: Wa: in script and print. And of course our "Complete" was his "Compleat." When not emending his "Angler" and welcoming adjunct authors, he wrote short biographies, or Lives, of men important to church and state, and edited their prose and verse.