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WALTON'S LIVES.

TO THE

RIGHT HONORABLE

AND REVEREND FATHER IN GOD,

GEORGE,

LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER,

AND PRELATE OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER
OF THE GARTER.

MY LORD,

I DID, some years past, present you with a plain relation of the Life of Mr. Richard Hooker, that humble man, to whose memory princes and the most learned of this nation have paid a reverence at the mention of his name. And now,

with Mr. Hooker's, I present you also the Life of that pattern of primitive piety, Mr. George Herbert; and, with his, the Life of Dr. Donne, and your friend Sir Henry Wotton, all reprinted. The two first were written under your roof; for which reason, if they were worth it, you might justly challenge a Dedication: and indeed, so

you might of Dr. Donne's and Sir Henry Wotton's; because, if I had been fit for this undertaking, it would not have been by acquired learning and study, but by the advantage of forty years' friendship, and thereby with hearing and discoursing with your Lordship, that hath enabled me to make the relation of these Lives passable (if they prove so) in an eloquent and captious

age.

And indeed, my Lord, though these relations be well-meant sacrifices to the memory of these worthy men, yet I have so little confidence in my performance, that I beg pardon for superscribing your name to them, and desire all that know your Lordship, to apprehend this not as a Dedication (at least by which you receive any addition of honor), but rather as an humble and a more public acknowledgment of your long continued, and your now daily favors to,

My Lord,

Your most affectionate

And most humble servant,

IZAAK WALTON.

TO THE READER.

THOUGH the several introductions to these several Lives have partly declared the reasons how and why I undertook them, yet since they are come to be reviewed and augmented and reprinted, and the four* are now become one book, I desire leave to inform you that shall become my reader, that when I sometime look back upon my education and mean abilities, it is not without some little wonder at myself, that I am come to be publicly in print. And though I have in those introductions declared some of the accidental reasons that occasioned me to be so, yet let me add this to what is there said, that by my undertaking to collect some notes for Sir Henry Wotton's writing the Life of Dr. Donne, and by Sir Henry's dying before he performed it, I became like those men that enter easily into a law-suit or a quarrel, and having begun, cannot make a fair

* He had not then written the Life of Bishop Sander

son.

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