Two songs by him are included in Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler, and in 1683 appeared Thealma and Clearchus. A Pastoral History in smooth and easie Verse. Written long since by John Chalkhill, Esq., an Acquaintant and Friend of Edmund Spencer (1683), with a preface written five years earlier by Walton.
Another poem, Aldilia, Philoparthens Loving Follie (1595, reprinted in vol. x. of the Jahrbuch des deutschen Shakespeare-Vereins) , was at one time attributed to him. Nothing further is known of the poet, but a person with the same name is recorded as one of the coroners for Middlesex in the later years of Elizabeth I's reign.
George Saintsbury, who included Thealma and Clearchus in vol. ii. of his Minor Poets of the Caroline Period (Oxford, 1906), points out a marked resemblance between Chalkhill's work and that of William Chamberlayne.
It was probably as an angler that he made the acquaintance of Sir Henry Wotton, but it is clear that Walton had more than a love of fishing and a humorous temper to recommend him to the friendship of the accomplished ambassador.
Their lives were evidently written with loving pains, in the same leisurely fashion as his Angler, and like it are of value less as exact knowledge than as harmonious and complete pictures of character.
Walton also rendered affectionate service to the memory of his friends Sir John Skeffington and JohnChalkhill, editing with prefatory notices Skeffington's Hero of Lorenzo in 1652 and Chalkhill's Thealma and Clearchus a few months before his own death in 1683.
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