INTRODUCTION. xi 



" Sir Henry Wotton, the scholar and statesman ; Charles 

 Cotton, the witty man of the world ; Fuller, the historian ; 

 Hales, then styled the 'ever memorable/ though now 

 almost forgotten; the benevolent and learned Dr. Hammond; 

 Donne, the first English satirist; Chillingworth, the acute 

 logician and Propugnator invictissimus of the .English 

 Church; the Bishops Morley, King, Ward, Sanderson, 

 Morton, and Ken ; and the Archbishops Usher and Shel- 

 don ; such were the intimate associates of Izaak Walton." 



It is of considerable moment in Walton's life that he 

 should have been the friend of Donne. From first to 

 last it is he who holds the chief place in the knot of 

 friends. Walton became acquainted with him as Vicar of 

 the parish in which he lived, St. Dunstan's in the West, and 

 before long their friendship had deepened into an intimacy 

 to which a difference of twenty years in their ages had 

 proved no hindrance. Donne had spent many years of his 

 life before entering holy orders, and when at last he did so, 

 he was a man of varied experiences, experiences which had 

 fostered a restrained and even an ascetic mood of mind, 

 rather than a wider and more tolerant. In the austere 

 spirit of his later years he regarded with contrition certain 

 poems of a decidedly licentious character which he had 

 written as a boy, expressing the wish that " they had been 

 abortive, or so short-lived that his own eyes had witnessed 

 their funerals." Having got the better of his youthful pro- 

 s, as it would seem, and learned how to restrain the 



passionate nature with which he had been endowed, he 

 became as notable for the severe rectitude of his behaviour 

 andj:he religious devotion of his character, as in his early 

 years he had been conspicuous for opposite qualities. The 

 morality, too, which was taught in his sermons and other 

 writings of his later years was not less strict than in his 



