To the moderate-minded the typical Royalist and Puritanic extremes of the civil war days could only have been vexatious to a degree. It is curious to observe how many scholars and writers of the middle of the seventeenth century make no allusion to what was passing around them. Take only the one instance of Isaac Walton, who at least lived in the very thick of the fray, in that pargeted and latticed-casemented old house of his at the corner of Chancery Lane. Truly, in his lives of the worthies and divines of the time, he alludes frequently to the religious and political divisions of the country, as indeed his themes entailed; but in his immortal volume, whose secondary title is the significant one of “The Contemplative Man’s Recreation,” scarce a shadow of the gloom of the times darkens its equable, sunshiny humour. Soberly, but with intense enjoyment, Master Isaac Walton takes his way from Fleet Street, and, stretching his legs over Tottenham Hill—no short stretch neither—he falls in with his hunter and falconer, gossips along the road to Ware, whither he is bound that “fine, fresh May morning”; and so the three trudge on together in genial discourse to the text that “good company makes the way to seem shorter.” How thoroughly the wayfarers enjoy the freshness of the country and the green beauty of the “new livery’d year”! How they delight in the milkmaid’s song, and luxuriate in the “honest alehouse with its cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall”! Last, not least, in the general intellectual and mental life of England in Charles’s reign, comes the band of poets, a goodly train, Cavalier or Puritan, or not greatly concerned for either, but writing in “numbers, Since the numbers came.” Milton, Cowley, Herrick, Lovelace, Herbert, Wither, Dekker, Webster, and many more, breathing forth sweet words and quaint aphorisms which mingle in our every-day talk, and are too familiar for us to pause to think whence or how they rise to the lips. Those dead poets of Charles’s reign resting beneath the hoary old stones of Westminster, or the sod of peaceful village graveyards, or whose dust the venom of bigots and fanatics has scattered, left their country a heritage which cannot perish while the English tongue endures.