Great and essential as the complete design is, it is not diffic ever to make Milton's inspiration clear by short passag even phrases. But the design remains, to be discovered of by the patient and humble reader. Once to behold it, in all lordly power and grace, is to rejoice in one of the sublime achie ments of English character and of English poetry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Milton's English Poems, including "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regain "Samson Agonistes," "Early Poems," etc., 2 vols., edited by R. C. Brown David Masson's Life of Milton.

Mark Pattison's Milton in the English Men of Letters Series.
Milton's Prose, 5 vols., in Bohn's Library.

VELL AND WALTON

§ 1

ARVELL, the friend of Milton, is genera Puritan poet, although his sympathies y with Charles I, and he wrote satires on t. Some of his noblest lines were written on

d: a leaden slumber lies,
leep over those wakeful eyes;
rays under the lids were fled,

;h his looks that piercing sweetness shed;
hich so majestic was as strong,
eprived of vigour, stretched along;
all discoloured, pale and wan,
other thing, no more that man!
ry vain! O, Death! O, wings!
world! O, transitory things!
at greatness in his shape decayed,
ough dead, greater than Death he laid,
tered face you something feign

ns Death, he yet will live again.

d him for his lyrics, Marvell was a master kind of writing is sometimes not far behind Marvell was an open-air man, joying in rivers and birds. No English poet, indeed, ore than he. Descriptions of the countryons of its various characteristic features, and

397

appreciations of its peculiar charm and beauty, figure largely throughout English literature. Spenser, Shakespeare, Herrick, and our contemporaries Hardy and Masefield, are but a few of the great writers who, in the course of their works, frequently convey the true spirit, as well as accurate portraits, of country life.

There is a group of writers who have specially devoted themselves to portraying and interpreting the sight and sounds and atmosphere of the country and its natural inhabitants.

"The Compleat Angler"

The first in order of time is Izaak Walton, born in 1593, whose Compleat Angler appeared in 1653, the author being then in his sixtieth year. From his youth upwards, his associates were of the cultivated class, his first wife being a descendant of Cranmer, and his second wife half-sister to Thomas Ken, the celebrated Bishop of Bath and Wells. In 1618, we find his name on the roll of the Ironmongers' Company, though what his actual business in London was, is not clear. Whatever it was, it enabled him to retire, free from financial anxiety, in 1644. After his retirement he lived for forty years; and it was during this period that the Compleat Angler and the Lives of his friends Donne, Wotton, and other almost equally distinguished men, were written.

The Compleat Angler is obviously the work of a writer who had reached the age of serenity. The postscript which appears at the end of the last page, "Study to be Quiet," is the keynote to the whole. It is professedly and, to a large extent actually, a practical handbook of the angler's art; but it is very much more than that. The book's sub-title, The Contemplative Man's Recreation, gives a hint of Walton's attitude both to angling and to life in general; and, as he says in his preface, "the whole