TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE AND REVEREND FATHER IN GOD, GEORGE, LORD BISHOP OF WINCHESTER, AND PRELATE OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER 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. retreat and be quiet when they desire it. And really, after such a manner I became engaged into a necessity of writing the Life of Dr. Donne, contrary to my first intentions; and that begot a like necessity of writing the Life of his and my ever honored friend, Sir Henry Wotton. And having writ these two Lives, I lay quiet twenty years, without a thought of either troubling myself or others, by any new engagement in this kind; for I thought I knew my unfitness. But about that time, Dr. Gauden (then Lord Bishop of Exeter) published the life of Mr. Richard Hooker (so he called it), with so many dangerous mistakes, both of him and his books, that discoursing of them with his Grace Gilbert, that now is Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, he enjoined me to examine some circumstances, and then rectify the Bishop's mistakes, by giving the world a fuller and truer account of Mr. Hooker and his books than that bishop had done; and I know I have done so. And let me tell the reader, that till his Grace had laid this injunction upon me, I could not admit a thought of any fitness in me to undertake it; but when he twice enjoined me to it, I then declined my own, and trusted his judgment, and submitted to his commands; concluding, that if I did not I could not forbear accusing myself of disobedience, and indeed of ingratitude for his many favors. Thus I became engaged into the third Life. |