ompleat Angler_ was printed in 1653. The lives were five in number,
of Hooker, Wotton, Donne, Herbert, and Sanderson. Several of these
were personal friends of the author, and Sir Henry Wotton was a brother
of the angle. The _Compleat Angler_, though not the first piece of
sporting literature in English, is unquestionably the most popular, and
still remains a favorite with "all that are lovers of virtue, and dare
trust in providence, and be quiet, and go a-angling." As in Ascham's
_Toxophilus_, the instruction is conveyed in dialogue form, but the
technical part of the book is relieved by many delightful digressions.
_Piscator_ and his pupil _Venator_ pursue their talk under a
honeysuckle hedge or a sycamore tree during a passing shower. They
repair, after the day's fishing, to some honest ale-house, with
lavender in the window, and a score of ballads stuck about the wall,
where they sing catches--"old-fashioned poetry but choicely
good"--composed by the author or his friends, drink barley wine, and
eat their trout or chub. They encounter milkmaids, who sing to them
and give them a draft of the red cow's milk, and they never cease their
praises of the angler's life, of rural contentment among the cowslip
meadows, and the quiet streams of Thames, or Lea, or Shawford Brook.

The decay of a great literary school is usually signalized by the
exaggeration of its characteristic traits. The manner of the
Elisabethan poets was {143} pushed into mannerism by their successors.
That manner, at its best, was hardly a simple one, but in the Stuart
and Commonwealth writers it became mere extravagance. Thus Phineas
Fletcher--a cousin of the dramatist--composed a long Spenserian
allegory, the _Purple Island_, descriptive of the human body. George
Herbert and others made anagrams and verses shaped like an altar, a
cross, or a pair of Easter wings. This group of poets was named, by
Dr. Johnson, in his life of Cowley, the metaphysical school. Other
critics have preferred to call them the fantastic or conceited school,
the later Euphuists, or the English Marinists and Gongorists, after the
poets Marino and Gongora, who brought this fashion to its extreme in
Italy and in Spain. The English _conceptistas_ were mainly clergymen
of the established Church, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Quarles, and
Herrick. But Crashaw was a Roman Catholic, and Cowley--the latest of
them--a layman.

The one who set the fashion was Dr. John Donne. Dean