So healing a book for the frenzy of fame is thy discourse on meadows, and pure streams, and the country life.  How peaceful, men say, and blessed must have been the life of this old man, how lapped in content, and hedged about by his own humility from the world!  They forget, who speak thus, that thy years, which were many, were also evil, or would have seemed evil to divers that had tasted of thy fortunes.  Thou wert poor, but that, to thee, was no sorrow, for greed of money was thy detestation.  Thou wert of lowly rank, in an age when gentle blood was alone held in regard; yet tiny virtues made thee hosts of friends, and chiefly among religious men, bishops, and doctors of the Church.  Thy private life was not unacquainted with sorrow; thy first wife and all her fair children were taken from thee like flowers in spring, though, in thine age, new love and new offspring comforted thee like ’the primrose of the later year.’  Thy private griefs might have made thee bitter, or melancholy, so might the sorrows of the State and of the Church, which were deprived of their heads by cruel men, despoiled of their wealth, the pious driven, like thee, from their homes; fear everywhere, everywhere robbery and confusion:  all this ruin might have angered another temper.  But thou, Father, didst bear all with so much sweetness as perhaps neither natural temperament, nor a firm faith, nor the love of angling could alone have displayed.  For we see many anglers (as witness Richard Franck aforesaid) who are angry men, and myself, when I get my hooks entangled at every cast in a tree, have come nigh to swear prophane.

Also we see religious men that are sour and fanatical, no rare thing in the party that professes godliness.  But neither private sorrow nor public grief could abate thy natural kindliness, nor shake a religion which was not untried, but had, indeed, passed through the furnace like fine gold.  For if we find not Faith at all times easy, because of the oppositions of Science, and the searching curiosity of men’s minds, neither was Faith a matter of course in thy day.  For the learned and pious were greatly tossed about, like worthy Mr. Chillingworth, by doubts wavering between the Church of Rome and the Reformed Church of England.  The humbler folk, also, were invited, now here, now there, by the clamours of fanatical Nonconformists, who gave themselves out to be somebody, while Atheism itself was not without many to witness to it.  Therefore, such a religion as thine was not, so to say, a mere innocence of evil in the things of our Belief, but a reasonable and grounded faith, strong in despite of oppositions.  Happy was the man in whom temper, and religion, and the love of the sweet country and an angler’s pastime so conveniently combined; happy the long life which held in its hand that threefold clue through the labyrinth of human fortunes!  Around thee Church and State might fall in ruins, and might be rebuilded, and thy tears would not be bitter, nor thy triumph cruel.