Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/107

Rh Lives. Walton was drawn into the writing of biography by his desire to leave the world some memorial of the virtues of men whom he had known. The men whom he chose for his subject were men like-minded with himself, men who had studied to be quiet, ‘to keep themselves in peace and privacy, and behold God’s blessing spring out of their mother earth.’ The Life of Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s, the first that he wrote, was contributed as preface to a collection of Donne’s sermons in 1640. Sir Henry Wotton, whose Life appeared in 1651, had been Walton’s friend and fellow angler during the quiet years that he spent at Eton College after his retirement from the service of the State—‘the College being to his mind as a quiet harbour to a seafaring man after a tempestuous voyage…. Nor did he forget his innate pleasure of angling’ (for an angler, according to Walton, is born, not made), ‘which he would usually call “his idle time not idly spent;” saying often, he would rather live five May months than forty Decembers.’ To these two lives Walton subsequently added three more, the Lives of Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert, and Dr. Robert Sanderson, the last being written almost forty years later than the Life of Donne. Walton had not known all these men, though they were all contemporary with his long life. But he was drawn by natural sympathy to their characters, and his portraits of them are masterpieces of delicate insight.

Indeed, Walton’s Lives are almost too perfect to serve as models. They are obituary poems; each of them has the unity and the melody of a song or a sonnet; they deal with no problems, but sing the praises of obscure beneficence and a mind that seeks its