Izaak Walton

Izaak Walton was a London ironmonger and then a linen-draper who retired at fifty on the outbreak of civil war to the country and to fishing, and wrote The Compleat Angler, the most reprinted book in English after the Bible and the Pilgrim’s Progress. He had known Donne, whose parishioner he was, and Herbert’s friends, and his Lives of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, Herbert and Sanderson are the first English biographies written from affection, and portraits of a church he loved through its suppression. The Lives of Donne and Herbert are the two the lists assign, and every reader of either poet reads them first.