ich he excelled. "He was a man," says the
historian, "of great parts and extraordinary endowment of nature, and of
great observation and a piercing judgment both into things and persons;
but his too good skill in persons made him judge the worse of things,
and so that upon the matter he wholly relied upon himself; and
discerning many defects in most men, he too much neglected what they
said or did. Of all his passions his pride was most predominant, which a
moderate exercise of ill fortune might have corrected and reformed; and
which was by the hand of Heaven strangely punished by bringing his
destruction on him by two things that he most despised--the people and
Sir Harry Vane. In a word, the epitaph which Plutarch records that Sylla
wrote for himself may not be unfitly applied to him--'that no man did
ever pass him either in doing good to his friends or in doing harm to
his enemies.'"

Izaak Walton, that amiable old angler, lived for some years (1627 to
1644) of his happy and contented life in a house (No. 120) on the west
side of Chancery Lane (Fleet Street end). This was many years before he
published his "Complete Angler," which did not, indeed, appear till the
year before the Restoration. Yet we imagine that at this time the honest
citizen often sallied forth to the Lea banks with his friends, the Roes,
on those fine cool May mornings upon which he expatiates so pleasantly.
A quiet man and a lover of peace was old Izaak; and we may be sure no
jingle of money ever hurried him back from the green fields where the
lark, singing as she ascended higher and higher into the air, and nearer
to the heavens, excelled, as he says, in her simple piety "all those
little nimble musicians of the air (her fellows) who warble forth their
various ditties with which Nature has furnished them, to the shame of
art." Refreshed and exhilarated by the pure country air, we can fancy
Walton returning homeward to his Chancery Lane shop, humming to himself
that fine old song of Marlowe's which the milkmaid sung to him as he sat
under the honeysuckle-hedge out of the shower,--

"Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, or hills, or field,
Or woods, or steepy mountain, yield."

How Byron had the heart to call a man who loved such simple pleasures,
and was so guileless and pure-hearted as Walton, "a cruel old coxcomb,"
and to wish that in his gullet he had a hook, and "a stro