Brian, a very eminent biblical scholar, was born in the year 1600, at Seymour in the district of Cleveland in Yorkshire. He is said to have been admitted a sizar of Magdalene College, Cambridge, in the month of July 1616. In 1618 he became a sizar of Peter House. He took the degree of A.B. in 1619, and that of A.M. in 1623. He left the university for a curacy and the mastership of a school in Suffolk. He next removed to the metropolis, as an assistant at the church of Allhallows, Bread Street; and in 1626 he was collated to the rectory of St Martin's Orgar, London. On the 15th of January 1635-6, he was instituted to the rectories of St Giles-in-the-Fields, and of Sandon in Essex. The former he does not appear to have retained. About this time, he is supposed to have been chaplain to the king, and to have been collated to a prebend of St Paul's. In 1649 he took the degree of D.D. at Cambridge; and in the public act, he maintained a thesis against the infallibility of the pope. His wife, Anne Claxton, died in the course of the following year.

Dr Walton was involved in the troubles which ensued; and in 1641 he is supposed to have been dispossessed of both his rectories. Towards the close of the year 1642 he was ordered into custody as a delinquent. Like many other members of his order, he afterwards sought a place of refuge at Oxford; and on the 12th of August 1645 he was incorporated doctor of divinity. Here among the learned fugitives he met with Dr Fuller, dean of Ely, whose daughter Jane became his second wife. On his return to London, he resided in the house of his father-in-law. Undismayed by the change of his circumstances, he planned and executed one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, literary enterprise of which his country can boast. This was the famous Polyglott Bible, of which the plan appears to have been brought to considerable maturity in the year 1652. The design was approved by the Council of State, who exempted from duty all the paper to be employed in the edition; and to the credit of the age it must be recorded, that in the month of May 1653, subscriptions had been obtained to the amount of L.9000. Dr Walton had various coadjutors, but the very laborious task of editorship devolved upon himself. As a precursor, he published Introductio ad Lectioem Linguarum Orientalium, Lond. 1654, 8vo. This introduction was reprinted at London in 1655. The great work itself was completed in the space of about four years, and made its appearance under the title of Biblia Sacra Polyglotta, &c., Lond. 1657, 6 tom. folio. In this edition, nine languages are employed, but not a single book is printed in so many. The four evangelists are in six, the other books of the New Testament only in five, and those of Judith and the Maccabees only in three. The Prolegomena have been repeatedly printed in a separate form, and are allowed by the most competent judges to be a work of great erudition, as well as of great value. The last edition is that of Wrangham, published at Cambridge in 1825, in 2 vols. 8vo.

Among those who assisted Walton in his very arduous undertaking, we must first of all mention the venerable Archbishop Usher, who not only aided and directed him by his counsel, but likewise furnished him with a collation of sixteen manuscripts. His learning was so varied and so profound, that it was of no small importance for the editor to have access to him on all occasions of doubt and difficulty. Another able coadjutor was Dr Lightfoot, and a third was Dr Pocock. The services of Edmund Castell, Abraham Wheelock, Patrick Young, Dudley Loftus, Herbert Thorndike, Thomas Hyde, Thomas Greaves, and several other individuals, are likewise commemorated. Selden, who possessed a great fund of oriental learning, was a zealous promoter of the design; and he joined with Usher in signing a recommendation which was printed with the prospectus. He was one of those to be consulted in the progress of the work, and his valuable library was open to the editor.

Dr Walton's next publication bears the title of Dissertatio, in qua de Linguis Orientalibus, Hebraica, Chaldaica, Samaritana, &c., et de Textu et Versionum quae in Complutensibus, Regius, Parisiensibus et Anglicanis Polyglottis Bibliis habentur, Antiquitate, Authoritate et Usu, breviter dissertatur, Davenantia, 1658, 12mo. This is followed by Wowe's Syntagma de Graeca et Latina Bibliorum Interpretatione. His meritorious labours were not duly appreciated by some of his contemporaries; and he was very unadvisedly attacked by Dr Owen, in Certain Considerations on the Prolegomena and Appendix to the late "Biblia Polyglotta." The writer was himself a man of learning; but the dangers which he contemplated were imaginary, and he ventured upon ground which he could not maintain against such an antagonist. His work was very ably refuted by Dr Walton, in The Considerator considered, Lond. 1659, 8vo. This work forms the second volume of Todd's Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Brian Walton, D.D., Lord Bishop of Chester, Lond. 1821, 2 vols. 8vo.

At the period of the Restoration, Dr Walton's great and conspicuous merits could not be disregarded. He was speedily restored to his former preferments, and was nominated to the bishopric of Chester. On the 2d of December 1660, he was consecrated in Westminster Abbey. In March following he was one of the commissioners at the Savoy conference, which so strikingly displayed the unmitigated bigotry of the triumphant churchmen. The Bishop of Chester however appears to have acted with sufficient moderation. His new honours were very short and fleeting. He reached his episcopal seat on the 11th of September 1661; and having soon afterwards returned to London, he died there on the 29th of the ensuing November, in the sixty-second year of his age.

Walton, Isaac, or Izaak, "the Father of Angling," and an early writer of great popularity, was born on the 9th of August 1593, in the parish of St Mary and town of Stafford. The condition of his father is not mentioned, but his mother is described as the daughter of Edmund Cranmer, archdeacon of Canterbury, and the niece of the archbishop. His own occupation was that of a shopkeeper, but his love of literature, as well as his upright and amiable simplicity of character, recommended him to the favour and friendship of many individuals distinguished by their talents and station. In 1624 we find him residing on the north side of Fleet Street, two doors west of Chancery Lane; Walton, and in 1632 he had removed to a house in the Lane. The tradition of his family represented him as a Hamburg merchant, or wholesale linen draper; but, according to Anthony Wood, he followed the occupation of a sempster. He married Ann the sister of Thomas Ken, afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells. While an inhabitant of St Dunstan's in the West, he was a regular attendant on the ministrations of Dr Donne, then vicar of the parish; and with this witty poet and divine he contracted a friendship, which was only terminated by death. Walton visited him in his last sickness, and wrote a circumstantial account of his life, which in 1640 accompanied a collection of the dean's Sermons. Another of his distinguished friends was Sir Henry Wotton, whose life he also undertook to write, and finished it about the year 1644. It was prefixed to the Reliquiae Wottonianae, which he edited in 1651. It is to be regretted that he did not execute his design of writing the lives of other two individuals connected with Eton, Sir Henry Savile and John Hales, both very eminent in their generation. About the year 1643, we are informed, he left London, and, with a fortune very far short of what would now be called a competency, seems to have retired altogether from business. While he resided in the metropolis, angling had been his favourite recreation, and in that art he arrived at great skill and proficiency. The result of his experience he embodied in a very pleasing volume, entitled The Complete Angler, or Contemplative Man's Recreation, Lond. 1653, 8vo. This work was so favourably received, that other four editions were published during the author's lifetime, namely, in 1655, 1664, 1668, and 1676. To this last impression a second part, containing instructions how to angle for trout or grayling, was added by his friend Charles Cotton. Of both parts there are many subsequent editions, and the popularity of the work continues unimpaired. An elaborate edition, with a life of the author, was published by Sir John Hawkins in the year 1760; and in 1833 Sir N. H. Nicolas published a splendid edition of it in 2 quarto vols., with an excellent life of the author. Walton having resumed his biographical labours, published the life of Hooker in 1662, that of Herbert in 1670, and that of Sanderson in 1678. His Lives were afterwards collected together, and in this form have repeatedly been printed. An edition containing a meagre account of the author, together with annotations, was published by Dr Zouch, York, 1796, 4to. The work, thus illustrated, reached a third impression, York, 1817, 2 vols. 8vo. Another good edition of Walton's Lives, with a Memoir of the author, was published by Dowling in 1857. These specimens of circumstantial biography are rendered very interesting by the native kindness of the author's disposition, and by the garrulous simplicity of his narrative. In 1680 he published, but without his name, Love and Truth, Lond. 1680, 4to. This tract was reprinted in Dr Zouch's edition of the Lives. At the age of ninety he edited Thealma and Clearchus; a Pastoral History in smooth and easy verse: written long since by John Chalkhill, Esq., an acquaintance and friend of Edmund Spencer, Lond. 1683, 8vo. As to this author, he states "that he was in his time a man generally known, and as well beloved; for he was humble, and obliging in his behaviour, a gentleman, a scholar, very innocent and prudent; and indeed his whole life was useful, quiet, and virtuous." Of this poem there is a recent edition. Chiswick, 1820, 12mo. The name of Chalkhill is otherwise so entirely unknown, that Mr Singer, who published this edition, is inclined to doubt whether the poem may not have been a youthful production of its first editor. But Sir H. Nicolas has set the matter at rest by proving the relationship of Chalkhill to Walton's second wife. Having attained to a healthful and happy old age, he died on the 15th December 1683, at Winchester, in the prebendal house of his son-in-law, Dr Hawkins, and was interred in the cathedral of that city. His wife died in 1662. Their son Isaac Walton having been educated at Oxford, became rector of Polshot, and canon residentiary of Salisbury. He died unmarried in the year 1716. His only sister Anne was married to William Hawkins, rector of Droxford, and prebendary of Winchester. Their only son, William Hawkins, was the author of a well-known Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown. There is an edition of Walton's whole works by Major, published in 1823.