LIFE OP WALTON. 



grateful acknowledgment of the honour done to 

 memory of his father. 



Doctor King-, afterwards bishop of Chichester, in a 

 letter to the author, thus expresses himself concerning 

 this life t " I am glad that the general demonstration 

 " of his [Doctor Donne's] worth was so fairly pre- 

 (i served, and represented to the world, by your pen, 

 " in the history of his life ; indeed, so well, that 

 " beside others, the best critic of our later time, Mr. 

 " John Hales of Eaton, affirmed to me, he had not 

 " seen a life written with more advantage to the subject, 

 <c or reputation to the writer, than that of Doctor 

 " Donne*." 



Sir Henry Wotton dying in 1639, Walton was im- 

 portuned by bishop King to undertake the writing his 

 tiife also; and, as it should seem by a circumstance 

 mentioned in the margin, it was finished about 1644t. 

 Notwithstanding which, the earliest copy I have yet 

 been able to meet with, is that prefixed to a Collection 

 of Sir Henry's Remains, undoubtedly made by Wal- 

 ton himself, intitled Reliquice Wottoniance, and by 

 him, in 1651, dedicated to lady Mary Wotton, and her 

 three daughters ; though in a subsequent edition in 

 1685, he has recommended them to the patronage of a 

 more remote relation of the author, namely Philip 

 earl of Chesterfield. 



The Precepts of Angling meaning thereby the Rules 

 and Directions for taking Fish with a Hook and Line 

 -till Walton's time, having hardly ever been reduced 

 to writing, were propagated from age to age chiefly by 

 tradition : but Walton, whose benevolent and communU 

 cative temper appears in almost every line of his writ* 

 ings, unwilling to conceal from the world those assistances 



1714, the very book, with the original manuscript letter, was in the 

 hands of the Rev. Mr. Borradale, rector of Market-Deeping, in the 

 county of Lincoln. 



* Bishop King's Letter to Walton before the GoIIution of tit Lives, in 

 1670. 



f It is certain that Hooter's Life was written about 1664, and Walton 

 says, in his Epistle before the Lives, that " there was an interval of twenty 

 M years between the writing of Hooter's Life and Wotton s t which fixe* 

 the date of the latter to 1644," 



