Donne married the woman he loved, in spite of her father and to the injury of his own fortunes. 'His marriage,' however, observes the biographer, 'was the remarkable error of his life; an error which, though he had a wit able and very apt to maintain paradoxes, yet he was very far from justifying it.' From our point of view, the only error was in the desire to justify an action of which he should have been proud. We must make allowance for the difference in Walton's views of domestic authority; but we feel that his prejudice disqualifies him from fairly estimating a character of great intrinsic force. A portrait of Donne cannot be adequately brought within the lines accepted by the writer of orthodox and edifying tracts. In spite of this little failing, this rather excessive subservience to the respectabilities, the 'Lives' form a delightful book; but we get the genuine Walton at full length in his 'Angler.' It was first published in dark days; when the biographer might be glad that his pious heroes had been taken from the sight of the coming evil; when the scattered survivors of his favourite school of divines and poets were turned out of their well-beloved colleges and parsonages, hiding in dark corners or plotting with the melancholy band of exiles in France and Holland; when Walton, instead of listening to the sound and witty discourses of Donne, would find the pulpit of his parish church profaned by some fanatical Puritan, expounding the Westminster Confession in place of the Thirty-nine Articles. The good Walton found consolation in the almost religious pursuit of his hobby. He fortified himself with the authority of such admirable and orthodox anglers as Sir Henry Wotton and Dr. Nowel, Dean of St. Paul's. Dr. Nowel had, 'like an honest angler, made that good, plain, unperplexed Catechism which is printed with our good old service-book;' for an angler, it seems, is most likely to know that the road to heaven is not through 'hard questions.' The dean died at the age of ninety-five, in perfect possession of his faculties; and ''tis said that angling and temperance were great causes of those blessings.' Evidently Walton had somehow taken for granted that there is an inherent harmony between angling and true religion, which of course for him implies the Anglican religion. He does not trust himself in the evil times to grumble openly, or to indulge in more than an occasional oblique reference to the dealers in hard questions and metaphysical dogmatism. He takes his rod, leaves the populous city behind him, and makes a day's march to the banks of the quiet Lea, where he can meet a likeminded friend or two; sit in the sanded parlour of the country inn, and listen to the milkmaid singing that 'smooth song made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago,' before English fields had been drenched with the blood of Roundheads and Cavaliers; or lie under a tree, watching his float till the shower had passed, and then calling to mind what 'holy Mr.