158 /. R. Lowell and Cotton. 



between the characters in Walton, while 

 he never loses an opportunity of speaking 

 in warmest praise of his old friend. I 

 must give a quotation or two from him, as 

 showing the esteem and affection in which 

 Walton was held by the handsome soldier- 

 courtier, and man of the world, Charles 

 Cotton. 



James Russell Lowell wrote an " Intro- 

 duction" to an edition of The Complete 

 Angler published in 1889 by Messrs. 

 Little, Brown, & Company, of Boston, 

 U.S.A., and it is pleasant to find such a 

 writer has no stone to throw at Cotton ; 

 for, indeed, editor after editor has almost 

 erected a monument to him in this 

 fashion. It is true that he, like Donne, 

 wrote some verse, of which he, like Donne, 

 was doubtless afterwards ashamed. As 

 Lowell says : "Cotton was a man of genius, 

 whose life was cleanlier than his muse 

 always cared to be. If he wrote the Virgil 

 Travesty, he also wrote verses which the 

 difficult Wordsworth could praise, and a 

 poem of gravely noble mood addressed to 

 Walton on his Lives, in which he shows a 

 knowledge of what goodness is that no 

 bad man could have acquired. Let one 

 line of it at least shine in my page, not 

 as a sample, but for its own dear sake : 



' For in a virtuous act all good men share.' " 



