xiv INTRODUCTION. 



his favourite sport, acquiring proficiency in the art of fly- 

 fishing, and so came to write the Second Part of The 

 Compkat Angler. 



In the year 1663 Cotton published The Moral Philosophy 

 of the Stoics, a translation from the French of M. de Vaix, 

 President of the Parliament of Provence, and in the next 

 year, presumably as an antidote to the foregoing work, came 

 the Scarronides, or Virgil Travestie. Of this work I am 

 scarcely qualified to speak, not having had time to peruse it, 

 but I shall give the reader one generally received opinion and 

 two indubitable facts: it is said to be characterised by " low 

 buffoonery, forced wit, and coarseness," it is commended by 

 Sir John Suckling, and has passed at least fourteen editions. 

 Other burlesques and translations came from his hand at 

 intervals, including, under the former head, A Voyage to 

 Ireland, a humorous account of his journey when sent 

 thither with a captain's commission in 1670. The year of 

 Walton and Cotton's first acquaintance is unknown, but 

 before 1676 they had been taken by the pleasing fancy of 

 calling each other father and son respectively, and it is 

 likely that their friendship was at that time one of twenty 

 years' standing. 



It was in 1646 that Walton, being not less than fifty-three 

 years of age, married his second wife. He was the kind 

 of man who almost inevitably marries, and our wonder- 

 ment as to how he comported himself in love is almost 

 as great as Queen Elizabeth's traditional curiosity to see 

 Falstaff in the same predicament. The course of true 

 love, indeed, is like to have run as smooth with the 

 author of The Contemplative Man's Recreation as ever it did 

 with any. A sentence in one of The Lives^ though we 

 should be sorry if it afforded a parallel, may yet give some 

 indication: "During which time," he says of Dr. Donne, 



