With the progress of knowledge and discussion many kinds of prose literature, which were not absolutely new, now began to receive wider extension.  Of this sort are the Letters from Italy, and other miscellanies included in the Reliquiae Wottonianae, or remains of Sir Henry Wotton, English embassador at Venice in the reign of James I., and subsequently Provost of Eton College.  Also the Table Talk—­full of incisive remarks—­left by John Selden, whom Milton pronounced the first scholar of his age, and who was a distinguished authority in legal antiquities and international law, furnished notes to Drayton’s Polyolbion, and wrote upon Eastern religions, and upon the Arundel marbles.  Literary biography was represented by the charming little Lives of good old Izaak Walton, the first edition of whose Compleat Angler was printed in 1653.  The lives were five in number; of Hooker, Wotton, Donne, Herbert, and Sanderson.  Several of these were personal friends of the author, and Sir Henry Wotton was a brother of the angle.  The Compleat Angler, though not the first piece of sporting literature in English, is unquestionably the most popular, and still remains a favorite with “all that are lovers of virtue, and dare trust in Providence, and be quiet, and go a-angling.”  As in Ascham’s Toxophilus, the instruction is conveyed in dialogue form, but the technical part of the book is relieved by many delightful digressions.  Piscator and his friend Venator pursue their talk under a honeysuckle hedge or a sycamore-tree during a passing shower.  They repair, after the day’s fishing, to some honest ale-house, with lavender in the window and a score of ballads stuck about the wall, where they sing catches—­“old-fashioned poetry but choicely good”—­composed by the author or his friends, drink barley wine, and eat their trout or chub.  They encounter milkmaids, who sing to them and give them a draft of the red cow’s milk and they never cease their praises of the angler’s life, of rural contentment among the cowslip meadows, and the quiet streams of Thames, or Lea, or Shawford Brook.

The decay of a great literary school is usually signalized by the exaggeration of its characteristic traits.  The manner of the Elizabethan poets was pushed into mannerism by their successors.  That manner, at its best, was hardly a simple one, but in the Stuart and Commonwealth writers it became mere extravagance.  Thus Phineas Fletcher—­a cousin of the dramatist—­composed a long Spenserian allegory, the Purple Island, descriptive of the human body.  George Herbert and others made anagrams, and verses shaped like an altar, a cross, or a pair of Easter wings.  This group of poets was named, by Dr. Johnson, in his life of Cowley, the metaphysical school.  Other critics have preferred to call them the fantastic or conceited school, the later Euphuists or the English Marinists and Gongorists, after the poets Marino and Gongora, who brought this fashion to its extreme in Italy and in Spain.  The English conceptistas were mainly clergymen of the established church:  Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Quarles, and Herrick.  But Crashaw was a Roman Catholic, and Cowley—­the latest of them—­a layman.