The lesser country-gentlemen, who have no establishments in town, rarely venture up, for fear of the footpads on the heath, and the insolence of the black-guard Cockneys.  Their wives are staid dames, learned at the brew-tub and in the buttery,—­but not speaking French, nor wearing hoops or patches.  A great many of the older exotic plants have become domesticated; and the goodwife has a flaming parterre at her door,—­but not valued one half so much as her bed of marjoram and thyme.  She may read King James’s Bible, or, if a Non-Conformist, Baxter’s “Saint’s Rest”; while the husband regales himself with a thumb-worn copy of “Sir Fopling Flutter,” or, if he live well into the closing years of the century, with De Foe’s “True-born Englishman.”

Poetic feeling was more lacking in the country-life than in the illustrative literature of the century.  To say nothing of Milton’s brilliant little poems, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” which flash all over with the dews, there are the charming “Characters” of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the graceful discourse of Sir William Temple.  The poet Drummond wrought a music out of the woods and waters which lingers alluringly even now around the delightful cliffs and valleys of Hawthornden.  John Dryden, though a thorough cit, and a man who would have preferred his arm-chair at Will’s Coffee-House to Chatsworth and the fee of all its lands, has yet touched most tenderly the “daisies white” and the spring, in his “Flower and the Leaf.”

But we skip a score of the poets, and bring our wet day to a close with the naming of two honored pastorals.  The first, in sober prose, is nothing more nor less than Walton’s “Angler.”  Its homeliness, its calm, sweet pictures of fields and brooks, its dainty perfume of flowers, its delicate shadowing-forth of the Christian sentiment which lived by old English firesides, its simple, artless songs, (not always of the highest style, but of a hearty naturalness that is infinitely better,)—­these make the “Angler” a book that stands among the thumb-worn.  There is good marrowy English in it; I know very few fine writers of our times who could make a better book on such a subject to-day,—­with all the added information, and all the practice of the newspaper-columns.  What Walton wants to say he says.  You can make no mistake about his meaning; all is as lucid as the water of a spring.  He does not play upon your wonderment with tropes.  There is no chicane of the pen; he has some pleasant matters to tell of, and he tells of them—­straight.

Another great charm about Walton is his childlike truthfulness.  I think he is almost the only earnest trout-fisher I ever knew (unless Sir Humphrey Davy be excepted) whose report could be relied upon for the weight of a trout.  I have many excellent friends—­capital fishermen—­whose word is good upon most concerns of life, but in this one thing they cannot be confided in.  I excuse it; I take off twenty per cent. from their estimates without either hesitation, anger, or reluctance.