x INTRODUCTION. 



seer of the poor. And it is to his credit that he should have 

 bee^rconiterit with such things as, at the age of fifty, he had 

 gained (his competence was not large), and that he should 

 have used his leisure in so fine a way. He found himself 

 at liberty to live gradually, to take his days one by one and 

 get all that was to be gained from them \vithout putting a 

 violence on his inclinations, and he was not so foolish as to 

 forego the opportunity. In a moderate use of his energies, 

 bodily and mental, he lived forty years of quiet strength and 

 pacific enjoyment. There was no effeteness either of body 

 or of mind as the years passed by, no falling away of 

 that healthy interest in men and their manners, no som- 

 nolent ineptitude, no weariness of living ; for he was nearly 

 fifty when he made his first essay in letters, and although 

 the last of The Lives was written in his eighty-fifth year, all 

 are equally pleasing ; and so we may well believe that the 

 eye and the intelligence were still clear, and his natural 

 strength but little abated when he was carried away by the 

 great frost in the ninety-first year of his age. During all his 

 life we remark no itch of writing, no eagerness to behold his 

 writings in print, or by means of them to make himself 

 famous : he was slow to write, and when he took up his pen 

 he wrote without haste and to please himself. 



From the time when he gave up business he seems to 

 have changed his place of abode at frequent intervals during 

 the six or seven years that followed, at one time staying at 

 his birthplace, at another in London, often, too, living in 

 the families of those " eminent clergymen of England," of 

 whom we are told '"he was much beloved." Indeed, the 

 greater number, though not all, of Walton's friends belonged 

 to the Church, and they prove an interesting study when we 

 see how they variously correspond, the more intimate of 

 them, to characteristics and sympathies of Walton's own. 



