INTRODUCTION. 



Evelyn sf his literary contemporaries Isaac Walton 

 &f Samuel Pepys. 



Among the prose writers of the second half of the seven- 

 teenth century John Evelyn holds a very distinguished 

 position. The age of the Restoration and the Revolution is 

 indeed rich in many names that have won for themselves an 

 enduring place in the history of English literature. South, 

 Tillotson, and Barrow among theologians, Newton in math- 

 amatical science, Locke and Bentley in philosophy and 

 classical learning, Clarendon and Burnet in history, L'Est- 

 range, Butler, Marvell and Dryden in miscellaneous prose, 

 and Temple as an essayist, have all made their mark by prose 

 writings which will endure for all time. But the names 

 which stand out most prominently in popular estimation as 

 authors of great masterpieces in the prose of this period are 

 certainly those of John Bunyan, John Evelyn, and Izaak 

 Walton. And along with them Samuel Pepys is also well 

 entitled to be ranked as a great contemporary writer, though 

 he was at pains to try and ensure his being permitted to 

 remain free from the publicity of authorship, for such time 

 at least as the curious might allow his Diary to remain hid- 

 den in the cipher he employed. 



With the great though untrained genius of Bunyan none 

 of these other three celebrated prose authors of this time has 

 anything in common. He stands apart from them in his fer- 

 vently religious and romantic temperament, in his richness of 



