ing an improper way: Christ and the church were no ingredients in their choice. . . .

Man and wife are equally concerned to avoid all offences of each other in the beginning of their conversation; every little thing can blast an infant blossom; and the breath of the south can shake the little rings of the vine, when first they begin to curl like the locks of a new weaned boy: but when by age and consolidation they stiffen into the hardness of a stem, and have, by the warm embraces of the sun and the kisses of heaven, brought forth their clusters, they can endure the storms of the north, and the loud noises of a tempest, and yet never be broken: so are the early unions of an unfixed marriage; watchful and observant, jealous and busy, inquisitive and careful, and apt to take alarm at every unkind word. . . . After the hearts of the man and the wife are endeared and hardened by a mutual confidence and experience, longer than artifice and pretence can last, there are a great many remembrances, and some things present, that dash all little unkindnesses in pieces....

There is nothing can please a man without love; and if a man be weary of the wise discourses of the Apostles, and of the innocency of an even and a private fortune, or hates peace, or a fruitful year, he hath reaped thorns and thistles from the choicest flowers of Paradise; 'for nothing can sweeten felicity itself but love;' but when a man dwells in love, then the breasts of his wife are pleasant as the droppings upon the Hill of Hermon ; her eyes are fair as the light of heaven; she is a fountain sealed, and he can quench his thirst, and ease his cares, and lay his sorrows down upon her lap, and can retire home to his sanctuary and refectory, and his gardens of sweetness and chaste refreshments. No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society. . . .

...

It is fit that I should infuse a bunch of myrrh into the festival goblet, and, after the Egyptian manner, serve up a dead man's bones at a feast: I will only shew it, and take it away again; it will make the wine bitter, but wholesome. But those married pairs that live as remembering that they must part again, and give an account how they treat themselves and each other, shall, at that day of their death, be admitted to glorious espousals; and when they shall live again, be married to their Lord, and partake of his glories, with Abraham and Joseph, St Peter and St Paul, and all the married saints. . . 'All those things that now please us shall pass from us, or we from them;' but those things that concern the other life are permanent as the numbers of eternity. And although at the resurrection there shall be no relation of husband and wife, and no marriage shall be celebrated but the marriage of the Lamb, yet then shall be remembered how men and women passed through this state, which is a type of that; and from this sacramental union all holy pairs shall pass to the spiritual and eternal, where love shall be their portion, and joys shall crown their heads, and they shall lie in the bosom of Jesus, and in the heart of God, to eternal ages. Amen.

(From the Sermon on 'The Marriage Ring.')

The Skylark.

For so I have seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest, than it could recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings; till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned music and motion from an angel, as he passed sometimes through the air, about his ministries here below: so is the prayer of a good man.

(From Sermon on The Return of Prayers.')

The Day of Judgment.

Even you and I, and all the world, kings and priests, nobles and learned, the crafty and the easy, the wise and the foolish, the rich and the poor, the prevailing tyrant and the oppressed party, shall all appear to receive their symbol; and this is so far from abating anything of its terror and our dear concernment, that it much increases it. For although concerning precepts and discourses we are apt to neglect in particular what is recommended in general, and in incidences of mortality and sad events, the singularity of the chance heightens the apprehension of the evil; yet it is so by accident, and only in regard of our imperfection; it being an effect of self-love, or some little creeping envy, which adheres too often to the unfortunate and miserable; or else because the sorrow is apt to increase by being apprehended to be in a rare case, and a singular unworthiness in him who is afflicted otherwise than is common to the sons of men, companions of his sin, and brethren of his nature, and partners of his usual accidents; yet in final and extreme events, the multitude of sufferers does not lessen but increase the sufferings; and when the first day of judgment happened —that, I mean, of the universal deluge of waters upon the old world-the calamity swelled like the flood, and every man saw his friend perish, and the neighbours of his dwelling, and the relatives of his house, and the sharers of his joys, and yesterday's bride, and the newborn heir, the priest of the family, and the honour of the kindred, all dying or dead, drenched in water and the divine vengeance; and then they had no place to flee unto, no man cared for their souls; they had none to go unto for counsel, no sanctuary high enough to keep them from the vengeance that rained down from heaven; and so it shall be at the day of judgment, when that world and this, and all that shall be born hereafter, shall pass through the same Red Sea, and be all baptised with the same fire, and be involved in the same cloud, in which shall be thunderings and terrors infinite. Every man's fear shall be increased by his neighbour's shrieks, and the amazement that all the world shall be in, shall unite as the sparks of a raging furnace into a globe of fire, and roll upon its own principle, and increase by direct appearances and intolerable reflections. He that stands in a churchyard in the time of a great plague, and hears the passing-bell perpetually telling the sad stories of death, and sees crowds of infected bodies pressing to their graves, and others sick and tremulous, and death dressed up in all the images of sorrow round about him, is not supported in his spirit by the variety of his sorrow;

and at doomsday, when the terrors are universal, besides that it is in itself so much greater, because it can affright the whole world, it is also made greater by communication and a sorrowful influence; grief being then strongly infectious, when there is no variety of state, but an entire kingdom of fear; and amazement is the king of all our passions, and all the world its subjects. And that shriek must needs be terrible, when millions of men and women, at the same instant, shall fearfully cry out, and the noise shall mingle with the trumpet of the archangel, with the thunders of the dying and groaning heavens, and the crack of the dissolving world, when the whole fabric of nature shall shake into dissolution and eternal ashes! . . .

Consider what an infinite multitude of angels, and men, and women shall then appear! It is a huge assembly when the men of one kingdom, the men of one age in a single province, are gathered together into heaps and confusion of disorder; but then, all kingdoms of all ages, all the armies that ever mustered, all that world that Augustus Cæsar taxed, all those hundreds of millions that were slain in all the Roman wars, from Numa's time till Italy was broken into principalities and small exarchates: all these, and all that can come into numbers, and that did descend from the loins of Adam, shall at once be represented; to which account, if we add the armies of heaven, the nine orders of blessed spirits, and the infinite numbers in every order, we may suppose the numbers fit to express the majesty of that God, and the terror of that Judge, who is the Lord and Father of all that unimaginable multitude! . . . The majesty of the Judge, and the terrors of the judgment, shall be spoken aloud by the immediate forerunning accidents, which shall be so great violences to the old constitutions of nature, that it shall break her very bones, and disorder her till she be destroyed. St Jerome relates out of the Jews' books, that their doctors used to account fifteen days of prodigy immediately before Christ's coming, and to every day assign a wonder; any one of which, if we should chance to see in the days of our flesh, it would affright us into the like thoughts which the old world had when they saw the countries round about them covered with water and the divine vengeance; or as these poor people near Adria and the Mediterranean Sea, when their houses and cities were entering into graves, and the bowels of the earth rent with convulsions and horrid tremblings. The sea, they say, shall rise fifteen cubits above the highest mountains, and thence descend into hollowness and a prodigious drought; and when they are reduced again to their usual proportions, then all the beasts and creeping things, the monsters and the usual inhabitants of the sea, shall be gathered together, and make fearful noises to distract mankind: the birds shall mourn and change their song into threnes and sad accents; rivers of fire shall rise from east to west, and the stars shall be rent into threads of light, and scatter like the beards of comets; then shall be fearful earthquakes, and the rocks shall rend in pieces, the trees shall distil blood, and the mountains and fairest structures shall return into their primitive dust; the wild beasts shall leave their dens, and shall come into the companies of men, so that you shall hardly tell how to call them, herds of men or congregations of beasts; then shall the graves open and give up their dead, and those which are alive in nature and dead in fear shall be forced from the rocks whither they went to hide them, and from caverns

of the earth where they would fain have been concealed; because their retirements are dismantled, and their rocks are broken into wider ruptures, and admit a strange light into their secret bowels; and the men being forced abroad into the theatre of mighty horrors, shall run up and down distracted, and at their wits' end; and then some shall die, and some shall be changed; and by this time the elect shall be gathered together from the four quarters of the world, and Christ shall come along with them to judgment.

(From the first Sermon for Advent Sunday, 'Doomsday Book, or Christ's Advent to Judgment.")

There are editions of the works by Bishop Heber, with a Life (15 vols. 1820-22), and by Eden (10 vols. 1847-54); and also in 'The English Divines' by Hughes (5 vols. 1831). See Coleridge's Literary Remains and Tulloch's Rational Theology; Dean Farrar's Masters in English Theology (1877), Bishop Barry's Classic Preachers (1878), and Professor Dowden's Puritan and Anglican (1901).

Dr Henry More (1614–87) was conspicuous among the English Platonists and metaphysicians of the seventeenth century. A native of Grantham in Lincolnshire, and Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, he devoted his life to study and religious meditation at Cambridge, and strenuously refused to accept preferment in the Church, which would have rendered it necessary for him to leave what he called his paradise. The friends of this amiable recluse once attempted to decoy him into a bishopric, and got him so far on the way to Whitehall to kiss the king's hand; but when told for what purpose they had brought him thither, he refused to move a step farther. He declined university appointments as remorselessly as he did one deanery and two bishoprics. He early revolted against the Calvinism of his parents, and gave himself entirely to philosophy, to Plato, and especially to the Neo-Platonists. He held that the wisdom of the Hebrews had descended to Pythagoras, and from him to Plato, in the writings of whom and his followers he believed that the true principles of divine philosophy were consequently to be found. He himself lived in an atmosphere of unusual spiritual exultation, and exercised great influence on the young. He man of uncommon benevolence, purity, and devotion. He was of a dreamy, poetical temperament; and from comparatively reasonable views he drifted gradually deeper into the abyss of mysticism or theosophy, and his works, which were extremely popular in the later half of the seventeenth century, decline progressively in value. Tulloch treats More as the most interesting but the most unreadable of the Cambridge Platonists. He was transcendentalist enough to accept as real the cures of the quack Greatrakes, and, like the philosophical sceptic Glanville, believed firmly in witches and witchcraft. Of his works the most important are The Mystery of Godliness; The Mystery of Iniquity: A Discourse on the Immortality of the Soul; the famous Divine Dialogues; treatises against atheism and idolatry; ethical, metaphysical, cabbalistical, and controversial volumes; expositions of the Apo

was a

calypse and the Book of Daniel; and Psychozoia Platonica, or a Platonical Song of the Soul, in four poems, 1642, afterwards published as Philosophical Poems, 1647. His poetry,' says Thomas Campbell, 'is not like a beautiful landscape on which the eye can repose, but may be compared to some curious grotto, whose gloomy labyrinths we might be curious to explore for the strange and mystic associations they excite.' We give two stanzas from the Psychozoia:

The Soul and Body.

Like to a light fast locked in lanthorn dark,
Whereby by night our wary steps we guide
In slabby streets, and dirty channels mark,

Some weaker rays through the black top do glide,
And flusher streams perhaps from horny side.
But when we've passed the peril of the way,
Arrived at home, and laid that case aside,
The naked light how clearly doth it ray,
And spread its joyful beams as bright as summer's day.

Even so the soul, in this contracted state,
Confined to these strait instruments of sense,
More dull and narrowly doth operate;

[hence,

At this hole hears, the sight must ray from thence,
Here tastes, there smells: but when she's gone from
Like naked lamp she is one shining sphere,
And round about has perfect cognoscence
Whate'er in her horizon doth appear:

She is one orb of sense, all eye, all airy ear.

The first two of the prose extracts are from More's Mystery of Godliness, the others from the Divine Dialogues:

Of the Works of God.

Whether therefore our eyes be struck with that more radiant lustre of the sun, or whether we behold that more placid and calm beauty of the moon, or be refreshed with the sweet breathings of the open air, or be taken up with the contemplation of those pure sparkling lights of the stars, or stand astonished at the gushing downfalls of some mighty river, as that of Nile, or admire the height of some insuperable and inaccessible rock or mountain; or with a pleasant horror and chillness look upon some silent wood, or solemn shady grove; whether the face of heaven smile upon us with a cheerful bright azure, or look upon us with a more sad and minacious countenance, dark pitchy clouds being charged with thunder and lightning to let fly against the earth; whether the air be cool, fresh, and healthful; or whether it be sultry, contagious, and pestilential, so that, while we gasp for life, we are forced to draw in a sudden and inevitable death; whether the earth stand firm, and prove favourable to the industry of the artificer; or whether she threaten the very foundations of our buildings with trembling and tottering earthquakes, accompanied with remugient echoes and ghastly murmurs from below; whatever notable emergencies happen for either good or bad to us, these are the Joves and Vejoves that we worship, which to us are not many, but one God, who has the only power to save or destroy. And therefore, from whatever part of this magnificent temple of his-the world-he shall send forth his voice, our hearts and eyes are presently directed thitherward with fear, love, and veneration.

Of the Evidence for the Existence of God. When I say that I will demonstrate that there is a God, I do not promise that I will always produce such arguments that the reader shall acknowledge so strong, as he shall be forced to confess that it is utterly impos sible that it should be otherwise; but they shall be such as shall deserve full assent, and win full assent from any unprejudiced mind.

For I conceive that we may give full assent to that which, notwithstanding, may possibly be otherwise; which I shall illustrate by several examples: Suppose two men got to the top of Mount Athos, and there viewing a stone in the form of an altar with ashes on it, and the footsteps of men on those ashes, or some words, if you will, as Optimo Maximo, or To agnosto Theo, or the like, written or scrawled out upon the ashes ; and one of them should cry out: Assuredly here have been some men that have done this. But the other, more nice than wise, should reply: Nay, it may possibly be otherwise; for this stone may have naturally grown into this very shape, and the seeming ashes may be no ashes, that is, no remainders of any fuel burnt there; but some inexplicable and unperceptible motions of the air, or other particles of this fluid matter that is active everywhere, have wrought some parts of the matter into the form and nature of ashes, and have fringed and played about so, that they have also figured those intelligible characters in the same. But would not anybody deem it a piece of weakness, no less than dotage, for the other man one whit to recede from his former apprehension, but as fully as ever to agree with what he pronounced first, notwithstanding this bare possibility of being otherwise?

So of anchors that have been digged up, either in plain fields or mountainous places, as also the Roman urns with ashes and inscriptions, as Severianus Ful. Linus, and the like, or Roman coins with the effigies and names of the Cæsars on them, or that which is more ordinary, the skulls of men in every churchyard, with the right figure, and all those necessary perforations for the passing of the vessels, besides those conspicuous hollows for the eyes and rows of teeth, the os styloeides, ethoeides, and what not. If a man will say of them, that the motions of the particles of the matter, or some hidden spermatic power, has gendered these, both anchors, urns, coins, and skulls, in the ground, he doth but pronounce that which human reason must admit is possible. Nor can any man ever so demonstrate that those coins, anchors, and urns were once the artifice of men, or that this or that skull was once a part of a living man, that he shall force an acknowledgment that it is impossible that it should be otherwise. But yet I do not think that any man, without doing manifest violence to his faculties, can at all suspend his assent, but freely and fully agree that this or that skull was once a part of a living man, and that these anchors, urns, and coins were certainly once made by human artifice, notwithstanding the possibility of being otherwise.

And what I have said of assent is also true in dissent; for the mind of man, not crazed nor prejudiced, will fully and irreconcilably disagree, by its own natural sagacity, where, notwithstanding, the thing that it doth thus resolvedly and undoubtedly reject, no wit of man can prove impossible to be true. As if we should make such a fiction as this-that Archimedes, with the same

individual body that he had when the soldiers slew him, is now safely intent upon his geometrical figures under ground, at the centre of the earth, far from the noise and din of this world, that might disturb his meditations, or distract him in his curious delineations he makes with his rod upon the dust; which no man living can prove impossible. Yet if any man does not as irreconcilably dissent from such a fable as this as from any falsehood imaginable, assuredly that man is next door to madness or dotage, or does enormous violence to the free use of his faculties.

of the γυναικοκρατούμενοι and the men of Arcladam that lie in childbed for their wives. Euistor. I perceive no small matters will puzzle Cuphophron's invention: and therefore tho' the yuvainoxparoÚμs [gunaikokratoumenoi, men ruled by women'] and the men of Arcladam that lie forty days in childbed for their wives, present themselves to my memory, yet I will pass them over.

Cuphophron. That's a very odd thing of the men of Arcladam, Euistor: I pray you, what is it?

:

Euist. When the woman is delivered, she gets out of the bed as soon as she can, and follows the business of the house; but the man lies in for so many days, and does all the offices of a mother to the infant, saving the giving it suck and the neighbours come a-gossiping to the man lying thus in bed, as in other countreys they do to the woman. And they of Arcladam give this reason for this custom, because the mother had a sufficient share of trouble in bearing the child and bringing him forth, and that therefore 'tis fit that the man should ease her now, and take off part of the care to himself, as Paulus Venetus reports.

Cuph. If the men of the country had had milk in their breasts, which several men have had, according to the testimony of many credible writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists, the custom had been more plausible. But such as it is, it has its reason, as you see, and it was not a pure piece of sottishness that carried them unto it. And for the gunaikokratoumenoi, in that the women rule them, it is a sign that it is fit they should. For it is in virtue of their strength, wit, or beauty. . . . They chose their kings of old from the beauty of their form, as Lucretius notes. And why do men rule the women, but upon account of more strength or more wisdom? But where the women rule the men, it is a sign they have more strength or wit, and therefore have a right to rule them. And indeed where do they not rule them? insomuch that the whole world in a manner are of the gunaikokratoumenoi. So that this is no peculiar disorder amongst the Barbarians, such as Mela and Diodorus Siculus mention.

Hylobares. The women are much beholden to you, Cuphophron, for your so kind and careful patronage of

them.

Cuph. I am of a large spirit, Hylobares; I love to be civil to all sects, sexes, and persons.

The gunaikokratoumenoi, men ruled by women, are dealt with in Aristotle's Politics. Arcladam is one of several odd spellings in the old Latin of Marco Polo for the region or tribe-located by Yule in western Yunnan-that Ramusio (and Purchas) calls Cardandan, and Yule Zardandan. Purchas, following Marco Polo, says of the people of Cardandan that when a woman is delivered of a child the man lyeth in and keepeth his bed, with visitation of gossips, the space of fortie days.' Purchas also reports the custom of the convade (as it is now called) from Brazil, where, to the joy of anthropologists, it still obtains.

Of the Pagans cruelty to their enemies, and
inhuman humanity to their friends.

Hyl. Cuphophron swallows all down very glibly. But, as I remember, there are some direful stories of the Pagans cruelty to their enemies, and inhuman humanity to their friends, that, methinks, should a little turn his stomach, Euistor.

Euist. There are very savage customes recorded in Pomponius Mela touching the Essedones, Axiacæ, and Geloni. The last clothe themselves and their horses with the skins of their slain enemies; with that part of the skin that covers the head they make a cap for themselves, with the rest they clothe their horses. The Essedones celebrate the funerals of their parents with great feasting and joy, eating their flesh minced and mingled with mutton (which is the manner of their burial of them); but tipping their skulls with gold, they make drinking-cups of them: as the Axiace quaffe in the heads of their slain enemies, as well as drink their blood in the field. In Castella del Oro the inhabitants also eat their own dead. But in the island Java, as Ludovicus Patritius reports, the children do not, like the Essedones, eat their parents, but when they are old and useless, sell them to the Anthropophagi, as the parents do the children, if desperately and irrecoverably sick in the judgment of the physician. For they hold it the noblest kind of burial to be interred in the belly of a man, and not to be eaten by worms to which if any expose the body of his dead friend, they hold it a crime not to be expiated by any sacrifice. The laws also of the Sardoans and Berbiccæ, which Ælian relates, are very savage; the one commanding the sons to knock the fathers o' th' head when they are come to dotage, the other prohibiting any to live above seventy years.

Hyl. Stop there, Euistor: let's hear what excuse the advocate of the Paynims can devise for these horrid

customs.

The meaning of Providence in permitting such horrid usages in the world.

Sophron. That is very profitably and seasonably noted, O Cuphophron: and tho' my judgment is not so curious as to criticize on the perpetual exactness of your applications of the sad miscarriages of the civilized parts of the world to those gross disorders of the Barbarians; yet your comparisons in the general have very much im pressed that note of Philotheus upon my spirit, That the more external and gross enormities committed by the barbarous nations, are as it were a reprehensive satyr of the more fine and hypocritical wickednesses of the civilized countries; that these civilized sinners, abominating those wilder extravagancies, may withal give sentence against their own no-less wickedness, but only in a less-ugly dress Whence it cannot be so great wonder that Providence lets such horrid usages emerge in the world, that the more affrightful face of sin in some places might quite drive out all similitude and appearance of it in others.

Bathynous. True, Sophron; but this also I conceive may be added, That divine Providence having the full comprehension of all the periods of ages, and the scenes of things succeeding in these periods, in her mind, permitted at first and afterwards some parts of the lapsed creation to plunge themselves into a more palpable darkness, that a more glorious light might

succeed and emerge. The lovely splendor of which Divine dispensation would not strike the beholder so vigorously, did he not cast his eyes also upon that region of blackness and sad tyranny of the devil in preceeding ages over deluded mankind, such as Euistor has so plentifully discovered. All these things therefore seem to have been permitted in design to advance the glory and adorn the triumph of the promised Messias, the true Son of God and Saviour of the world.

The Opera Omnia of More, containing the Latin text of all the works, whether published originally in Latin or in English, appeared in 1679. See the Life by Richard Ward (1712), and Tulloch's Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy (vol. ii. 1874).

Izaak Walton,

'the father of angling,' was born at Stafford in 1593. He was an English worthy of the simple antique cast, who retained in the heart of London, and in the midst of close and successful application to business, an unworldly simplicity of character and an inextinguishable fondness for country scenes, pastimes, and recreations. As author, he had a power of natural description and lively dialogue that has rarely been surpassed. His Compleat Angler is a rich storehouse of rural pictures and pastoral poetry, of quaint but wise thoughts, of pleasing and humorous fancies, and of truly apostolic purity and kindliness. A tincture of superstitious credulity and innocent eccentricity gives the book a special flavour and zest, without detracting from its higher power to soothe, instruct, and delight. Of Walton's education or his early years nothing is related; but according to Anthony Wood, he acquired a modest competency as a sempster or linen-draper in London. He had a shop in the Royal Burse in Cornhill, which was seven feet and a half long, and five wide. He had therefore the intellectual advantage certified to by Lord Bacon in his observation that a small room helps a studious man to condense his thoughts. He had a more pleasant and spacious study, however, in the fields and rivers in the neighbourhood of London, 'in such days and times as he laid aside business, and went a-fishing with honest Nat. and R. Roe.' From the Royal Burse, Izaak—for so he always wrote his name-removed to Fleet Street, where he had one half of a shop, the other half being occupied by a hosier. He married in 1626

Rachel Floud, who died in 1640; in 1647 he married again, his second wife being Anne, halfsister of Bishop Ken. This brought Walton the acquaintance of the eminent men and dignitaries of the Church, at whose houses he spent much of his time in his later years, especially after the death of his second wife in 1662, 'a woman of remarkable prudence, and of the primitive piety.'

Walton retired from business in 1643, and lived forty years afterwards in uninterrupted leisure. His first work was a Life of Dr Donne prefixed to a collection of that great man's sermons, published in 1640. Sir Henry Wotton was to have written Donne's life, Walton merely collecting the materials; but Sir Henry dying before he had begun

to execute the task, Izaak 'reviewed his forsaken collections, and resolved that the world should see the best plain picture of the author's life that his artless pencil, guided by the hand of truth, could present.' Thus it was that he produced one of the most delightful miniature biographies in all English literature. He next wrote a brief and charming Life of Sir Henry Wotton (1651), and edited his literary remains. In 1652 he published a small work, a translation by Sir John Skeffington from the Spanish, The Heroe of Lorenzo, to which he prefixed a short affectionate notice of his friend, the translator. His principal production, The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative Man's Recreation, appeared in 1653. Walton also wrote Lives of Richard Hooker (1662), George Herbert (1670), and Bishop Sanderson (1678). The Lives of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, and Sanderson-all exquisitely simple, touching, and impressive-were collected into one volume, which was one of Dr Johnson's favourite books. Though no man seems to have possessed his soul more patiently during the troublous times in which he lived, the venerable Izaak was tempted, in 1680, to write and publish anonymously two letters on the Distempers of the Times, 'written from a quiet and comformable citizen of London to two busie and factious shopkeepers in Coventry. In 1683, when in his ninetieth year, he published the Thealma and Clearchus of Chalkhill (see page 443), and he died at Winchester on the 15th December of the same year, in the house of his son-in-law, Dr Hawkins, prebendary of Winchester.

The Compleat Angler of Walton is unique in our literature. In writing it, he says he made ‘a recreation of a recreation,' and, by mingling innocent mirth and pleasant scenes with the graver part of his discourse, he designed it as a picture of his own disposition. His statements about fish are not always accurate, and his advice to anglers on their art by no means unexceptionable; the best part of his work is the idyllic and self-revealing element. The original edition had but thirteen chapters; the fourth (1676) had twenty-one, and a Second Part' by Chartes Cotton. To the two original interlocutors, Piscator and Viator (the Fisherman and the Wayfarer), Walton had added in the second and greatly enlarged edition (1655) the Falconer (Auceps), and changed Viator into Venator (Hunter). The Hunter and Falconer serve in the dialogues only as foils to the venerable and complacent Piscator, in whom the interest of the piece wholly centres. The opening scene lets us at once into the genial character of the work and its hero. The three interlocutors meet accidentally on Tottenham Hill, near London, on a fine fresh May morning.' They are open and cheerful as the day. Piscator is going towards Ware, Venator to meet a pack of otter dogs upon Amwell Hill, and Auceps to Theobalds, to see a hawk that a friend there mews or moults for him. Piscator willingly joins with the lover of hounds in helping to destroy otters, for he hates them per