which they have since become familiar. The Life of Robert Sanderson was added in 1678. Walton was married twice, his first wife dying in 1640, all her seven children having died in infancy. He presently married again, this time Anne, the half-sister of the celebrated Bishop Thomas Ken (1637-1711); she also died, very shortly before Walton settled in Winchester, but leaving a son and a daughter.

The daughter, Anne, eventually married William Hawkins, a prebendary of Winchester. It has been thought that about 1680 Walton moved over from his rooms in the palace to his son-in-law's house; he certainly died in the latter place on the 15th of December 1683. He had entered his ninety first year; his venerable host, the Bishop, who was little younger, survived him only by a few months. Izaak Walton lies buried in the north transept of Winchester Cathedral, under a black basalt slab. Walton's happy disposition and love of literature, combined with an easy effusiveness of temperament and a constitutional tendency to hero - worship, brought him into communication with a vast number of people from whose society the barriers of his trade would otherwise have excluded him. He forms a curious exception to the aristocratic and professional literary habit of the seventeenth century. He was always graceful, prudent, and serviceable, and he had a genius for retaining the friends he made; Ashmole said that he was "well beloved of all good men." Walton is great in two directions; he is the founder of modern, easy biography; he is the first of our piscatory authors. As Mr. Andrew Lang has excellently said: "Our angling literature is copious, practical, full of anecdote; Walton alone gave it style. He is not so much unrivalled as absolutely alone. Heaven meant him for the place he fills, as it meant the cowslip and the Mayfly."

FROM WALTON'S "LIFE OF MR. GEORGE HERBERT."

In a late retreat from the business of this world, and those many little cares with which I have too often cumbered myself, I fell into a contemplation of some of those historical passages that are recorded in Sacred Story: and more particularly of what had passed betwixt our blessed Saviour and that wonder of women, and sinners, and mourners, St. Mary Magdalen. I call

her Saint, because I did not then, nor do now consider her, as when she was possessed with seven devils; nor as when her wanton eyes and dishevelled hair were designed and managed to charm and ensnare amorous beholders. But I did then, and do now consider her, as after she had expressed a visible and sacred sorrow for her sensualities; as after those eyes had wept such a flood of penitential tears as did wash, and that hair had wiped, and she most passionately kissed the feet of hers and our blessed Jesus. And I do now consider, that because she loved much, not only much was forgiven her : but that beside that blessed blessing of having her sins pardoned, and the joy of knowing her happy condition, she also had from him a testimony that her alabaster box of precious ointment poured on his head and feet, and that spikenard, and those spices that were by her dedicated to embalm and preserve his sacred body from putrefaction, should so far preserve her own memory, that these demonstra

Izaak Walton's Autograph on a Copy of
Thomas Flatman's Poems

tions of her sanctified love, and of her officious and generous gratitude, should be recorded and mentioned wheresoever his Gospel should be read; intending thereby, that as His, so her name, should also live to succeeding generations, even till time itself shall be no more.

James Howell (1594?-1666), one of the fifteen children of Thomas Howell Howell of Abernant, Carmarthenshire, was probably born in 1594 at Llangammarch in the county of Brecon. He was educated at the Free School of Hereford under "a learned but lashing master," and proceeded to Jesus College, Oxford, in 1610. He took his degree at the close of 1613, and long afterwards (1623) he was elected. a fellow of his college. But although Howell was always a loving son of Oxford, he had few opportunities of residing there. At the age of twenty he was apprenticed

to a glass manufacturer in Broad Street, London, and soon became steward or manager. He showed such a remarkable aptitude for business, that the firm sent him abroad to study the continental modes of making glass, and to secure the best materials. He was travelling, chiefly in Holland, Spain, and Italy, from 1616 to 1622, and having linguistic gifts, he became unusually skilled in the principal European languages; he says that he could talk seven tongues with fluency. His visit to England in 1622

was brief. He abandoned the glass business, in which he saw no opening for the future, and he adopted first a travelling tutorship, and then secretarial work as a profession; he was in Spain from 1622 to the end of 1624. Now, at the age of about thirty, he resolved to settle in England, and he entered the service first of the Duke of Buckingham, then (1626-28) of Lord Scrope. As Lord Wentworth's man, Howell entered the House of Commons, M.P. for Richmond in Yorkshire, in 1627. In 1632, he was taken to Denmark, as his private secretary, by the Earl of Leicester. For the next few years, Howell, driven from pillar to post, seems to have gained a precarious livelihood by clerical work. In 1640 he began his literary career by the publication of his political allegory, called Dendrologia; or Dodona's Grove, of which he published simultaneously a French translation; at this time he went over to Paris, and offered his services in vain to the Cardinal Richelieu. At length, in 1642, he became for a few months Clerk of the Council, but this apparent success was a disaster in disguise, for he attracted the unfavourable notice of Parliament, and in the course of the next year five armed men rushed, one morning, into his office with swords drawn and pistols cocked, and not merely arrested Howell, but confiscated all his MSS. and correspondence. A few days later he was thrown into the Fleet Prison, where he was left to languish for eight years. He was deep in debt, and "had now nothing to trust to but his pen." Howell, therefore, became perforce a professional man of letters, and contrived to support himself entirely by miscellaneous authorship. It was from prison that he began to publish his famous Epistola Ho-Eliana, or Familiar Letters, of which three volumes issued from the Fleet, in 1645, 1647, and 1650; a fourth followed in 1655. If, as we are to believe, Howell had been deprived of all his papers, those letters must have been compiled from memory; they were, however, accepted at the time as

The Tomb of Izaak Walton in Winchester
Cathedral

The Right Hot Cownell of State,

That, Wharos ypon & his Change of Goverment, devolution of Interest from kingly power to a Common Wealth they may happen som question touching the primitur & Inalienable Right that Great Britain Aaymes to the Souverainty of her own pas as lath allready apprend by the lake clash that broke out 4 wixt os & Holland (which may well be sayed to be a Comer pralth of Englands (reation) It were Expedient, humbly under froor, that a new Treats b. compits for the vindication, and continuance of this Right not withstanding this Change, And if the Stak be plead to impose to honorable a comand ypony lebscriber, He will employ his best abilities to perform it; In which Tritik not only all the harned Reason & Authorities of mr setsen shatte produced, but the truth of the thing shatte nimfored and asserted by further arguments, Examples, & Evideners. And it were requisit that the layed Treative shots go published in French, as well as English, French being the most comunicable language If Comever among those nations whom the knowlidy her of doth most concern, dio may much-avryk to disperse the truth, Drabisfer the Work in this · pont

Jam Mowell.

Petition of James Howell to the Council of State, offering to compose a fresh Treatise

on Great Britain's Sovereignty of the Seas

genuine contributions to current history, and were read with extreme avidity. They marked the rise of a new class of literature in England, the elaborately-composed essay-letter, of which Balzac had set the type in France. When Howell emerged from prison, he devoted himself to the flattery of Cromwell, yet contrived to recover favour when the king came back. Charles II. created and amply endowed the post of Historiographer Royal for Howell in 1661, SO that the close of his fugitive and harassed life was comfortable. He died early in November 1666, and was buried in the Temple Church. His miscellaneous and occasional effusions in prose and verse, and his translations, are extremely numerous; he was always hovering on the borders of what we now call journalism.

Title-page of James Howell's "Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ,"

with the Author's Portrait

In a long and curious letter, addressed to Lord Cliffe on the 7th of October 1634, Howell discusses at large the drinks of the world. In the course of it, he tells such stories as these:

The countries that are freest from excess of drinking are Spain and Italy. If a woman can prove her husband

to have been thrice drunk, by the ancient laws of Spain she may plead for a divorce from him. Nor, indeed, can the Spaniard, being hot-brained, bear much drink, yet I have heard that Gondamar was once too hard for the King of Denmark, when he was here in England. But the Spanish soldiers that have been in the wars of Flanders will take their cups freely, and the Italians also. When I lived t'other side the Alps, a gentleman told me a merry tale of a Ligurian soldier, who had got drunk in Genoa; and Prince Doria going a-horseback to walk the round one night, the soldier took his horse by the bridle, and asked what the price of him was, for he