happiness in the shade. No English writer before Walton had so skilfully illustrated men’s natural disposition and manners from the most casual acts and circumstances. It is not in the crisis of great events that he paints his heroes, but in their most retired contemplations and the ordinary round of their daily life. We see Hooker as he was found by his pupils at Drayton Beauchamp tending his small allotment of sheep in a common field, with the Odes of Horace in his hands, and hear him called away by the voice of his wife to rock the cradle; we find George Herbert tolling the bell and serving at the altar of his little church at Bemerton, and overhear his conversations with his parishioners by the roadside; we come upon Dr. Sanderson, a man whose only infirmities were that he was too timorous and bashful, as Walton met him in the bookseller’s quarter of Little Britain, where he had been to buy a book; we notice that he is dressed ‘in sad-coloured clothes, and, God knows, far from being costly;’ and, on the sudden coming-on of a shower of rain, we are allowed to accompany him and his biographer to ‘a cleanly house,’ where they have bread, cheese, ale, and a fire for their money, and where we are permitted to overhear their talk on the troubles of the times. Or we see Dr. John Donne dressed in his winding sheet, with his face exposed and his eyes shut, standing for his picture in his study, that so his portrait when it was finished might serve to keep him in mind of his death. All these sketches and many more in Walton’s Lives are as perfect, in their way, as the Idylls of Theocritus.
Intimate biography of this kind was the creation of the Seventeenth Century, and Walton had many fol-
