Wells arose too out of his sturdy refusal to countenance the Merry Monarch’s irregular life, for he refused to let Mistress Eleanor Gwynne have the use of his house to lodge in, a refusal which angered the king at the time, but conciliated his respect, for on the bishopric falling vacant he declared that none should have it but the “good little man who refused his lodging to poor Nelly.” Izaak Walton, Ken’s relative, made Winchester his residence during the closing years of his long life--a man of culture and some literary pretension, apart altogether from his immortal _Compleat Angler_, for his lives of Donne and Herbert attained to some celebrity; tradition connects a certain summer-house by the stream in the Deanery garden with him and his fishing, and in several places in his _Compleat Angler_ he makes allusion to our Winchester streams, showing that he had ofttimes baited his angle by one or other of its waters. Peace to his soul--he rests in the Cathedral, in Silkstede’s Chapel, and the verses over his tomb, though devoid of all literary merit, are said to have been written by Ken his kinsman. Our next possession is a greater name--and that, moreover, a Hampshire, though not in any real sense a Winchester one--the Hampshire novelist, the most charming and natural of women writers, Jane Austen. Here in the early days of 1817, when a deadly and insidious malady had attacked her, she came with her sister Cassandra to lodge in a house in College Street, occupied then by a Mrs. David, in the vain hope that Winchester medical skill might restore her strength. The following letter from her pen,[3] written at this period, reveals the characteristic _espièglerie_ of the writer, which not even advancing weakness could disarm or subdue. MRS. DAVID’S, COLLEGE STREET, WINTON, _Tuesday, May 27th_.