200 THE COMPLETE ANGLER. 



gler, and the author of excellent Piscatory Eclogues, in which 

 you shall see the picture of this good man's mind : and I wish 

 mine to be like it. 



A''o empty hopes, no courtly fears him fright, 

 j\''o begging wants his middle fortune bite ; 

 But sweet content exiles both misery and spite. 

 His certain life, that never can deceive him. 



Is full of thousand sweets and rich content ; 

 The smooth-leav'd beeches in the field receive him 



With coolest shade, till noon-tide's heat be spent : 

 His life is neither toss'd in boisterous seas, 

 Or the vexatious world, or lost in slothful ease ; 

 Pleas' d and full blest he lives, when he his God can please. 



His bed, more safe than soft, yields quiet sleeps. 

 While by his side his faithful spouse hath place ; 



His little son into his bosom creeps. 



The lively picture of his father's face : 



His humble house, or poor state, ne'er torment him ; 



Less he could like, if less his God had lent him : 



And when he dies, green turfs do for a tomb content him. 



Gentlemen, these were a part of the thoughts that then pos- 

 sessed me ; and I there made a conversion of a piece of an old 

 catch,* and added more to it, fitting them to be sung by us anglers : 



* Hawkins has an interesting note here, of which I give the substance : 

 " The reader is not to be surprised at this motion of Venator, or that Pis- 

 cator so readily accepts it. Atthe time tliat Walton wrote, and long be- 

 fore, music was so generally well understood, that a man who had any voice 

 or ear v>os always supposed able to sing his part in a madrigal at sight. 

 (Peacham's Complete Gentleman, p. 100, Morley's Introduction to Prac- 

 tical Music, 1507). In an old book of Enigmas, there is a cut represent- 

 ing a barber's shop, where a customer is playing a lute while waiting his 

 turn to be shaved. This explains that passage in Ben Jonson's Silent Wo- 

 man, Act III., sc. 5, where Morose cries out — ' That cursed barber — I 

 have married his cittern that's common to all men ;' meaning that his wife 

 was like the cittern in the barber's sbop, with which any one might amuse 

 himself." Music in England was at its height from about the middle of 

 the sixteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century. 



Dr. Taylor, also, says, in his Inaugural Lectures at Gresham College, 

 that " music was cultivated at that period with consummate ability, unre- 

 mitted zeal and abundant success, as is seen in the compositions come down 



