Xll INTRODUCTION. 



ing when the hour comes for leaving the playhouse. 

 There is obviously a good deal to be said on the side 

 of this easy sect, sometimes, and not unreasonably, 

 held by irreverent minds to be wiser than even the 

 accredited Professors of Wisdom themselves. For 

 since we now have it on the best philosophical au- 

 thority that our transcendental pryings are in effect 

 no better than a child's efforts to lay hold of the 

 moon, it would seem, on Philosophy's own showing, 

 to be high time for her votaries to turn from their 

 noumenal will-o'-the-wisps, and to content them- 

 selves with enjoying where they are not permitted 

 to comprehend. 



With some reservations on the honorable score of 

 an inbred religious bent, the author of the little book 

 in the hand of the reader was a "philosopher" of the 

 comfortable type indicated in the foregoing. Izaak 

 Walton was not the man to look Nature's gift-horses 

 in the mouth. To his practical, shop-keeping sense 

 an actual bird in the hand was worth any number of 

 illusory birds in the metaphysical bush ; and we are 

 inclined to believe that few men have entered this 

 world blessed with a keener zest for its wholesomer 

 pleasures (the " unreproved pleasures " of Milton), or, 

 what is perhaps more to the point, kept that sense 

 in its original nicety longer than this "Common 

 Father of All Anglers." Nature, in balancing his 

 account, has fondly placed it to the credit of Izaak 

 Walton that for him no "fine, fresh May morning" 

 ever dawned, no bird ever sang, or blossom shed its 

 fragrance in vain. The outward details that remain 

 to us of this life are sufficiently meagre ; " comfort- 

 ably " so, says Mr. Lowell, in the tone of one who 



