at the mention of his name. And now, with Mr. Hooker's, I present you also the life of that pattern of primitive piety, Mr. George Herbert; and, with his, the life of Dr. Donne, and your friend Sir Henry Wotton, all reprinted.-The two first were written under your roof; for which reason, if they were worth it, you might justly challenge a Dedication: And indeed, so you might of Dr. Donne's and Sir Henry Wotton's; because, if I had been fit for this undertaking, it would not have been by acquired learning or study, but by the advantage of forty years friendship, and thereby with hearing and discoursing with your Lordship, that hath enabled me to make the relation of these lives passable (if they prove so) in an eloquent and captious age. years he read the service of the Church of England twice every day, catechized once a veck, and adum sered the communion once a month to all the gh in the town who cou'd come to it ; remderly and strictly olme,vu z all the parochial duties of a Cergym in, as he did afterward at Breda for four years to gelær. Valker, a halli tory of the Sufferings of the (74), hamg quote i Anteny Woods character of this prelate, concia les with this excamation: “() that but a single portion of his spirit tight always rest on the established clergy" ded And indeed, my Lord, though these relations be well-meant sacrifices to the memory of these worthy men, yet I have so little confidence in ny performance, that I beg pardon for superribing your name to them, and desire all that know your Lordship, to apprehend this not as a Dedication (at least by which you receive any addition of honour), but rather as an humble, and a taore public acknowledgment of your long-continued, and your now daily favours to, My Lord, Your most affectionate And most humble servant, IZAAK WALTON. AS TO THE READER. THOUGH the several introductions to these several lives have partly declared the reasons how, and why I undertook them, yet since they are come to be reviewed, and augmented, and reprinted, and the four are now become one book", I desire leave to inform you that shall become my reader, that when I sometimes look back upon my educa tion and mean abilities, it is not without some little wonder at myself, that I am come to be publicly in print. And though I have in those introductions declared some of the accidental reasons that occasioned me to be so, yet let me add this to what is there said, that by my undertaking to collect some notes for Sir Henry Wotton's writing the Life of Dr. Donne', and 'He had not then written the Life of Bishop Sanderson. In the preceding Epistle Dedicatory, our Author modestly res gus all claina to acquired learning or study." Henry Wotton addressed the following letter to Mr. Isco by Sir Henry Wotton's dying before he performed it, I became like those men that enter easily into a law-suit or a quarrel, and having begun, cannot make a fair retreat and be quiet, when they desire it.-And really, after such a manner, I became engaged into a necessity of writing the Life of Dr. Donne, contrary to my first intentions; and that begot a like necessity of Walton, who had requested him to perform his promise of writing the Life of Dr. Donne: "MY WORTHY FRIEND, “I ain not able to yield any reason, no not so much as may satisfie myself, why a most ingenuous letter of yours hath "lain so long by me (as it were in lavender) without an "answer, save this only, the pleasure I have taken in your "style and conceptions, together with a meditation of the "subject you propound, may seem to have cast me into a “gentle slumber. But, being now awaked, I do herein return "you most hearty thanks for the kind prosecution of your “first motion, touching a just office due to the memory of “ our ever-memorable friend; to whose good fune, though "it be needless to add any thing (and, my age considered, "almost hopeless from my pen), yet I will endeavour to “perform my promise, if it were but even for this cause, * that in saying somewhat of the life of so deserving a man, ** I may percă aice over-live mir e own. “That wish you add of Dr. King (now nade Dean of · Rochester, and by that translated u to my native soui) is a "great spur to me, with whom I hope shotly to confer "about it in my pissage towards Ehton Malherb (which ** was may genital air), and moite lun to a fren i-hop with "t'at far ly, where i is prede voor was fatilarly, acqua : ted, I all write to you at large by the next messenger (bing |