There are no colours in the fairest sky, So fair as these: the feather whence the pen Was shaped, that traced the lives of these good men, In statesman, priest, and humble citizen. Methinks their very names shine still and bright, Around meek WALTON's heavenly memory! WORDSWORTH. AND PRELATE OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER MY LORD, I did some years past, present you with a plain relation of the Life of Mr. Richard Hooker, that humble man, to whose memory, Princes and the most learned of this nation, have paid a reverence at the mention of his name. with Mr. Hooker's, I present you also, the Life And now, 1 Dr. George Morley, distinguished by his unshaken loyalty and attachment to Charles I. was, at the Restoration, first made Dean of Christ-church, and then Bishop of Worcester. In 1662 he was translated to the see of Winchester. Though nominated one of the Assembly of Divines, he never did them the honour, nor himself the injury, to sit among them. During his absence from his native country, he endeared himself to several learned foreigners, particularly to Andrew Rivettus, Heinsius, Salmasius, and Bochart. He constantly attended the young exiled King; but not being permitted to follow him into Scotland, he retired to Antwerp, where 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. And indeed, my Lord, though these relations be wellmeant sacrifices to the memory of these worthy men; yet I have so little confidence in my performance, that I beg pardon for superscribing 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 more publick acknowledgement, of your long-continued, and your now daily favours to My Lord, Your most affectionate, and most humble servant, IZAAK WALTON. for about three or four years he read the service of the Church of England twice every day, catechized once a week, and administered the communion once a month to all the English in the town who could come to it; regularly and strictly observing all the parochial duties of a clergyman, as he did afterwards at Breda for four years together. He died in 1684. 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 education 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 by Sir Henry Wotton's dying before he performed it, I became like those men that enter easily into a lawsuit 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 writing the Life of his and my ever-honoured friend, Sir Henry Wotton. And having writ these two Lives, I lay quiet twenty years, without a thought of either troubling myself or others, by any new engagement in this kind; for I thought I knew my unfitness. But, about that time, 2 He had not then written the Life of Bishop Sanderson. 3 Dr. Gauden (then Lord Bishop of Exeter) published the Life of Mr. Richard Hooker (so he called it), with so many dangerous mistakes, both of him and his books, that discoursing of them with his Grace Gilbert, that now is Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, he enjoined me to examine some circumstances, and then rectify the Bishop's mistakes, by giving the world a fuller and truer account of Mr. Hooker and his books than that Bishop had done; and I know I have done so. And let me tell the Reader, that till his Grace had laid this injunction upon me, I could not admit a thought of any fitness in me to undertake it; but when he twice had enjoined me to it, I then declined my own, and trusted his judgment, and submitted to his commands; concluding, that if I did not, I could not forbear accusing myself of disobedience, and indeed of ingratitude, for his many favours. Thus I became engaged into the third life. For the life of that great example of holiness, Mr. George Herbert, I profess it to be so far a free-will offering, that it was writ chiefly to please myself, but yet not without some respect to posterity: For though he was not a man that the next age can forget, yet many of his particular acts and virtues might have been ne 3 Dr. John Gauden, born at Mayland in Essex, educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, was Dean of Bocking, and Master of the Temple, in the beginning of the reign of Charles I. In 1660 he was made Bishop of Exeter, and from thence promoted to Worcester in 1662, in which year he died, aged 57 years. It must be owned, that he was one of the Assembly of Divines in 1643, and that he took the covenant; to which, however, he made some scruples and objections, so that his name was soon struck out of the list. He abandoned the cause of the Parliament as soon as they relinquished their first avowed principles of reforming only, instead of extirpating Episcopacy and Monarchy. 1 |