14 LIFE OF IZAAK WALTON. 



thought it would be acceptable to all tempers, because there 

 were shades in it for the warm, and sunshine for those of a 

 cold constitution : that with youthful readers, the facetious 

 parts would be proper to make the serious more palatable, 

 while some reverend old readers might fancy themselves, in 

 his History of the Church, as in a flower garden, or one full of 

 evergreens/' " And why not," said Fuller, " the Church History 

 so decked, as well as the Church itself at a most holy season, 

 or the Tabernacle of old at the feast of boughs ?" -" That was 

 but for a season," said Walton ; " in your feast of boughs, they 

 may conceive, we are so overshadowed throughout, that the 

 parson is more seen than his congregation, and this, some- 

 times, invisible to its own acquaintance, who may wander in 

 the search till they are lost in the labyrinth." " Oh 1" said 

 Fuller, "the very children of our Israel may find their way out 

 of this wilderness." " True," replied Walton, "as, indeed, they 

 have here such a Moses to conduct them."* 



To pursue the subject of the biographical writings : About 

 two years after the Restoration, Walton wrote the Life of Mr 

 Richard Hooker, author of the Ecclesiastical Polity. He was 

 enjoined to undertake this work by his friend Dr Gilbert 

 Sheldon, {- afterward archbishop of Canterbury, who, by the 

 way, was an angler. Bishop King, in a letter to the author,^ 

 says of this life, " 1 have often seen Mr Hooker with my father, 

 who was after bishop of London ; from whom, and others at 

 that time, I have heard most of the material passages which 

 you relate in the history of his life." Sir William Dugdale, 

 speaking of the three posthumous books of the Ecclesiastical 

 Polity, refers the reader " to that seasonable historical discourse, 

 lately compiled and published, with great judgment and 

 integrity, by that much deserving person, Mr Isaac Walton." $ 



The Life of Mr George Herbert, as it stands the fourth and 

 last in the volume, wherein that, and the three former are 

 collected, seems to have been written the next after Hooker's ; 



From a manuscript collection of diverting sayings, stories, characters, 

 Sec. in verse and prose, made about the year 1686, by Charles Cotton, 

 Esq. some time in the library of the Earl of Halifax. Vide Biographia 

 Sritannica, 2061, note p. in margin. 



The editors of the above work have styled this colloquy a witty confa- 

 bulation, but it seems remarkable for nothing but its singularity, which 

 consists in the starting of a metaphor and hunting it down. 



f Walton's Epistle to the Reader of the Lives, in 8vo. 1670. 



j Before the Lives. 



Short View of the late Troubles in England, folio, 1681, p. Sfy 



