selves in the easy
balance of his style. Sanderson, Pearson, Baxter, the two former luminaries
of the Church, the latter one of the chief literary lights of
Nonconformity, belong more or less to the period, as does Bishop Hall.
Baxter is the most colloquial, the most fanciful, and the latest, of the
three grouped together; the other two are nearer to the plainness of
Chillingworth than to the ornateness of Jeremy Taylor. Few English prose
writers again are better known than Izaak Walton, though it might be
difficult to prove that in matter of pure literature he stands very high.
The engaging character of his subjects, and the still more engaging display
of his own temper and mode of thought which he makes in almost every
sentence, both of his _Complete Angler_ and of his hardly less known
_Lives_, account for the survival and constant popularity of books which
are neither above nor below the better work of their time in literary form.
Walton was born in 1593 and died ninety years later. His early manhood was
spent in London as a "linen-draper," but in friendly conversation with the
best clerical and literary society. In 1643 he retired from London to avoid
the bustle of the Civil War, and the _Complete Angler_ appeared in 1653.
Another writer contemporary with Walton, though less long-lived, James
Howell, has been the subject of very varying judgments; his appeal being
very much of the same kind as Walton's, but addressed to a different and
narrower class of persons. He was born in 1594(?) of a fair Welsh family,
was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, was employed more than once on
confidential business errands on the Continent, entered Parliament, was
made Clerk of the Council, was imprisoned for years in the Fleet during the
Civil War, received at the Restoration the post of Historiographer, and
died in 1666. He wrote all manner of things, but has chiefly survived as
the author of a large collection of Familiar Letters, which have been great
favourites with some excellent judges. They have something of the agreeable
garrulousness of Walton. But Howell was not only much more of a gossip than
Izaak; he was also a good deal of a coxcomb, while Walton was destitute of
even a trace of coxcombry. In one, however, as in the other, the attraction
of matter completely outdoes the purely literary attraction. The reader is
glad to hear at first hand what men thought of Raleigh's execution; how
Ben Jonson behaved in his cups; how fo