I must not omit to mention his charming biographic sketches (rather than “lives”) of Hooker, of Wotton, of Herbert, of Donne--the letterpress of all these flowing easily and limpidly as the brooks he loved to picture. He puts in very much pretty embroidery too, for which tradition or street gossip supplied him with his needs, in figure and in color; this is not always of best authenticity, it is true;[38] but who wishes to question when it is the simple-souled and always honest Walton who is talking? And as for his great pastoral of _The Complete Angler_--to read it, in whatever season, is like plunging into country air, and sauntering through lovely country solitudes. I name Sir Thomas Overbury[39]--who was the first, I think, to make that often-repeated joke respecting people who boasted of their ancestry, saying “they were like potatoes, with the best part below ground”--because he belonged to this period, and was a man of elegant culture and literary promise. He was poisoned in the Tower at the instance of some great people about the court of James, who feared damaging testimony of his upon a trial that was just then to come off; and this trial and poisoning business, in which (Carr) Somerset and Lady Essex were deeply concerned, made one of the greatest scandals of the scandalous court of King James. Overbury’s _Characters_ are the best known of his writings, but they are slight; quaint metaphors and tricksy English are in them, with a good many tiresome affectations of speech. What he said of the Dairymaid is best of all. _George Herbert._ This is a name which will be more familiar to the reader, and if he has never encountered the little olive-green, gilt-edged budget of Herbert’s[40] poems, he can hardly have failed to have met, on some page of the anthologies, such excerpt as this about Virtue: “Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky, The dew shall weep thy fall to-night; For thou must die. “Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave, Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye, Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die. “Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like season’d timber, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives.”