uneducated, a
nonconformist minister, exposed continually to insult and persecution; and,
like Bunyan, he threw himself heart and soul into the conflicts of his age,
and became by his public speech a mighty power among the common people.
Unlike Jeremy Taylor, who wrote for the learned, and whose involved
sentences and classical allusions are sometimes hard to follow, Baxter went
straight to his mark, appealing directly to the judgment and feeling of his
readers.

The number of his works is almost incredible when one thinks of his busy
life as a preacher and the slowness of manual writing. In all, he left
nearly one hundred and seventy different works, which if collected would
make fifty or sixty volumes. As he wrote chiefly to influence men on the
immediate questions of the day, most of this work has fallen into oblivion.
His two most famous books are _The Saints' Everlasting Rest_ and _A Call to
the Unconverted_, both of which were exceedingly popular, running through
scores of successive editions, and have been widely read in our own
generation.

IZAAK WALTON (1593-1683). Walton was a small tradesman of London, who
preferred trout brooks and good reading to the profits of business and the
doubtful joys of a city life; so at fifty years, when he had saved a little
money, he left the city and followed his heart out into the country. He
began his literary work, or rather his recreation, by writing his famous
_Lives_,--kindly and readable appreciations of Donne, Wotton, Hooker,
Herbert, and Sanderson, which stand at the beginning of modern biographical
writing.

In 1653 appeared _The Compleat Angler_, which has grown steadily in
appreciation, and which is probably more widely read than any other book on
the subject of fishing. It begins with a conversation between a falconer, a
hunter, and an angler; but the angler soon does most of the talking, as
fishermen sometimes do; the hunter becomes a disciple, and learns by the
easy method of hearing the fisherman discourse about his art. The
conversations, it must be confessed, are often diffuse and pedantic; but
they only make us feel most comfortably sleepy, as one invariably feels
after a good day's fishing. So kindly is the spirit of the angler, so
exquisite his appreciation of the beauty of the earth and sky, that one
returns to the book, as to a favorite trout stream, with the undying
expectation of catching something. Among a thousand books on angling it
stands almost