Each age has its joys and preoccupations; each epoch its dominant tendencies and interests; these are displayed in contemporary writings more convincingly than in any other heritage that comes down to us, and the reading of biographies and autobiographies can do more toward giving us a clear and general vision of an epoch than any other study can do. In Plutarch’s time, when oratory was prized equally with statesmanship, the great men who were to figure in the _Famous Lives_ were chosen almost exclusively from those whose eloquence and whose diplomacy had made them prominent among their contemporaries. “Belles-Lettres” were a sign of culture then; beautiful expression of speech an art; hence, the biographies of famous men included especially orators and statesmen. Later, when the world was engrossed in long periods of wars and conquests; when Mars was more venerated than the Muses; and when honours and glories went to those who distinguished themselves on the battlefield, crusaders and conquerors received the homage of mankind. Their lives and deeds were set down for posterity. Then came the long years of the Renaissance; the time when men’s eyes were turned toward artistic possessions and achievements which heretofore had been neglected and which, as a result of familiarity with other countries, they had now learned to appreciate. They saw tendencies and realisations which theirs did not possess; they envied the artistic superiority of their neighbours and they steeped themselves and their children in the new beauty which had been revealed to them. The dominant passion of the cultured class--the class to which writing and reading were more or less familiar pleasures--was an adoration of art which had become the glory of the period. Small wonder that the greatest biographies and autobiographies of these times were of artists. Vasari wrote of painters, sculptors and architects and Plutarch was his model and his master. At a time when England was free from external and internal disturbances, a draper with literary bent solaced his old age with writing, and consequently we have in Izaak Walton’s _Life of Richard Hooker_ and of _John Donne_ and three other friends, the first really great biography of modern times. The outstanding charm of Walton’s _Lives_ is that they reveal the author more clearly than the subject. With the exception of Walpole and Pepys, and possibly Boswell, no biographer, letter-writer or diarist has left his measure to posterity with such completeness and accuracy as did Walton.