story, that the birds were to be fed at his tomb daily. The original gravestone with its Latin inscription has disappeared; but in 1843 a new monument was erected over the spot. There is also a fine statue of the poet at Bozen, unveiled in 1877.
Historically interesting as Walther's political verses are, their merit has been not a little exaggerated by modern German critics, who saw their own imperial aspirations and anti-papal prejudices reflected in this patriotic poet of the middle ages. Of more lasting value are the beautiful lyrics, mainly dealing with love, which led his contemporaries to hail him as their master in song (unsers sanges meister). He is of course unequal. At his worst he does not rise above the tiresome conventionalities of his school. At his best he shows a spontaneity, a charm and a facility which his rivals sought in vain to emulate. His earlier lyrics are full of the joy of life, of feeling for nature and of the glory of love. Greatly daring, he even rescues love from the convention which had made it the prerogative of the nobly born, contrasts the titles “woman” (wîp) and “lady” (froûwe) to the disadvantage of the latter, and puts the most beautiful of his lyrics—Unter der linden—into the mouth of a simple girl. A certain seriousness, which is apparent under the joyousness of his earlier work, grew on him with years. Religious and didactic poems become more frequent; and his verses in praise of love turn at times to a protest against the laxer standards of an age demoralized by political unrest. Throughout his attitude is healthy and sane. He preaches the crusade; but at the same time he suggests the virtue of toleration, pointing out that in the worship of God
“Christians, Jews and heathen all agree.”
He fulminates against “false love”; but pours scorn on those who maintain that “love is sin.” In an age of monastic ideals and loose morality there was nothing commonplace in the simple lines in which he sums up the inspiring principle of chivalry at its best:—
“Swer guotes wîbes liebe hât
“Der schamt sich ieder missetât.”[1]
Altogether Walther's poems give us the picture not only of a great artistic genius, but of a strenuous, passionate, very human and very lovable character.
The Gedichte were edited by Karl Lachmann (1827). This edition of the great scholar was re-edited by M. Haupt (3rd ed., 1853). Walther v. d. Vogelweide, edited by Franz Pfeiffer, with introduction and notes (4th edition, by Karl Bartsch, Leipzig, 1873). Glossarium zu d. Gedichten Walther's, nebst e. Reimverzeichnis, by C. A. Hornig (Quedlinburg, 1844). There are translations into modern German by B. Obermann (1886), and into English verse Selected poems of Walter von der Vogelweide by W. Alison Phillips, with introduction and notes (London, 1896). The poem Unter der Linden, not included in the latter, was freely translated by T. L. Beddoes (Works, 1890), more closely by W. A. Phillips in the Nineteenth Century for July 1896 (ccxxxiii. p. 70). Leben u. Dichten Walther's von der Vogelweide, by Wilhelm Wilmanns (Bonn, 1882), is a valuable critical study of the poet's life and works. (W. A. P.)
WALTON, BRIAN (1600–1661), English divine and scholar, was born at Seymour, in the district of Cleveland, Yorkshire, in 1600. He went to Cambridge as a sizar of Magdalene College in 1616, migrated to Peterhouse in 1618, was bachelor in 1619 and master of arts in 1623. After holding a school mastership and two curacies, he was made rector of St Martin's Orgar in London in 1628, where he took a leading part in the contest between the London clergy and the citizens about the city tithes, and compiled a treatise on the subject, which is printed in Brewster's Collectanea (1752). His conduct in this matter displayed his ability, but his zeal for the exaction of ecclesiastical dues was remembered in 1641 in the articles brought against him in parliament, which appear to have led to the sequestration of his very considerable preferments.[2] He was also charged with Popish practices, but on frivolous grounds, and with aspersing the members of parliament for the city. In 1642 he was ordered into custody as a delinquent; thereafter he took refuge in Oxford, and ultimately returned to London to the house of William Fuller (1580?-1659), dean of Ely, whose daughter Jane was his second wife. In this retirement he gave himself to Oriental studies and carried through his great work, a Polyglot Bible which should be completer, cheaper and provided with a better critical apparatus than any previous work of the kind (see Polyglot). The proposals for the Polyglot appeared in 1652, and the book itself came out in six great folios in 1657, having been printing for five years. Nine languages are used: Hebrew, Chaldee, Samaritan, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Ethiopic, Greek and Latin. Among his collaborators were James Ussher, John Lightfoot and Edward Pococke, Edmund Castell, Abraham Wheelocke and Patrick Young, Thomas Hyde and Thomas Greaves. The great undertaking was supported by liberal subscriptions, and Walton's political opinions did not deprive him of the help of the Commonwealth; the paper used was freed from duty, and the interest of Cromwell in the work was acknowledged in the original preface, part of which was afterwards cancelled to make way for more loyal expressions towards that restored monarchy under which Oriental studies in England immediately began to languish. To Walton himself, however, the Reformation brought no disappointment. He was consecrated bishop of Chester in December 1660. In the following spring he was one of the commissioners at the Savoy Conference, but took little part in the business. In the autumn of 1661 he paid a short visit to his diocese, and returning to London he died on the 29th of November.
However much Walton was indebted to his helpers, the Polyglot Bible is a great monument of industry and of capacity for directing a vast undertaking, and the Prolegomena (separately reprinted by Dathe, 1777, and by Francis Wranghan, 1825) show judgment as well as learning. The same qualities appear in Walton's Considerator Considered (1659), a reply to the Considerations of John Owen, who thought that the accumulation of material for the revision of the received text tended to atheism. Among Walton's works must also be mentioned an Introductio ad lectionem linguarum orientalium (1654; 2nd ed., 1655), meant to prepare the way for the Polyglot.
See Henry J. Todd, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Walton (London, 1821), in 2 vols., of which the second contains a reprint of Walton's answer to Owen.
WALTON, IZAAK (1593–1683), English writer, author of The Compleat Angler, was born at Stafford on the 9th of August 1593; the register of his baptism gives his father's name as Jervis, and nothing more is known of his parentage. He settled in London as an ironmonger, and at first had one of the small shops, 7½ ft. by 5 ft., in the upper storey of Gresham's Royal Burse or Exchange in Cornhill. In 1614 he had a shop in Fleet Street, two doors west of Chancery Lane. Here, in the parish of St Dunstan's, he gained the friendship of Dr John Donne, then vicar of that church. His first wife, married in December 1626, was Rachel Floud, a great-great-niece of Archbishop Cranmer. She died in 1640. He married again soon after, his second wife being Anne Ken—the pastoral “Kenna” of The Angler's Wish—step-sister of Thomas Ken, afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells. After the Royalist defeat at Marston Moor, he retired from business. He had bought some land near his birthplace, Stafford, and he went to live there; but, according to Wood, spent most of his time “in the families of the eminent clergymen of England, of whom he was much beloved”; and in 1650 he was again living in Clerkenwell. In 1653 came out the first edition of his famous book, The Compleat Angler. His second wife died in 1662, and was buried in Worcester cathedral church, where there is a monument to her memory. One of his daughters married Dr Hawkins, a prebendary of Winchester. The last forty years of his long life seem to have been spent in ideal leisure and occupation, the old man travelling here and there, visiting his “eminent clergymen” and other brethren of the angle, compiling the biographies of congenial spirits, and collecting here a little and there a little for the enlargement of his famous treatise. After 1662 he found a home at Farnham Castle with George Morley, bishop of Winchester, to whom he dedicated his Life of George Herbert and also that of Richard Hooker; and from time to time he visited Charles Cotton in
- ↑
“He who has the love of a good woman
“Is ashamed of every misdeed.”
- ↑ He was from January 1635–1636 rector of Sandon, in Essex, where his first wife, Anne Claxton, is buried. He appears to have also been a prebendary of St Paul's, and for a very short time he had held the rectory of St Giles in the Fields.
