20 LIFE OF WALTON. 



The religious opinions of good men are of little importance to 

 others, any farther than they conduce to virtuous practice ; 

 since we see, that as well the different persuasions of Papist 

 and Protestant, as the several no less differing parties into 

 which the reformed religion is unhappily subdivided, have 

 produced men equally remarkable for their endowments, sincere 

 in their professions, and exemplary in their lives. But were it 

 necessary, after what has been above remarked of our author, 

 to be particular on this head, we should say that he was a 

 very dutiful son of the Church of England ; nay further, 

 that he was a friend to an hierarchy, or, as we should now 

 call such a one, a high churchman ; for which propensity 

 of his, if it needs an apology, it may be said, that he had 

 lived to see hypocrisy and fanaticism triumph in the subversion 

 of both our ecclesiastical and civil constitution, the important 

 question of toleration had not been discussed, the extent of 

 regal prerogative, and the bounds of civil and religious liberty 

 had never been ascertained, and he, like many other good men, 

 might look on the interests of the Church, and those of religion, 

 as inseparable. 



At a time when animosities between the Sectarian and High- 

 Church parties prevailed without any prospect of their 

 termination, Walton, from solicitude for the welfare of his 

 country and not with a view to embarrass himself in disputa- 

 tion, for he was averse to controversy gave an ingenuous 

 and undissembled account of his faith and practice, as a 

 true son of the Church of England : publishing, in 1680, a 

 treatise under the title of " Love and Truth, in two modest and 

 peaceable Letters, concerning the Distempers of the present 

 Times ; written from a quiet and conformable Citizen of London, 

 to two busie and factious Shopkeepers in Coventry." The 

 motto to it was, " But let none of you suffer as a busie-body in 

 other men's matters ! " 1 Pet. iv. 15. Walton suppressed his 

 name in the title page : but for ascribing it to his pen, there is 

 the sufficient authority of Archbishop Bancroft, who, in the 

 volume of Miscellanies (" Miscellanea," 14 ; 2, 34), in the library 

 of Emanuel College, Cambridge, has, with his own hand, marked 

 its title thus : " Is. Walton's 2 letters cone. y e Distemps of y e 

 Times, 1680." The style, the sentiment, the argumentation, are 

 such as might be expected from a plain man, actuated only by 

 an honest zeal to promote the public peace. And if we consider 

 that it was written by our " quiet and conformable citizen," in 

 the eighty-seventh year of his age a season of life when the 

 faculties of the mind are usually on the decline, it will be scarcely 

 possible not to admire the. clearness of his judgment and the 

 unimpaired vigour of his memory. The work, which breathes 



