His "Behemoth," a history of the Civil War, was suppressed by the King, and was posthumously published. He translated the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" into very poor verse; he wrote his autobiography in Latin verse, and was still writing in 1679 when he died on 4 December.
The style of Hobbes is lucid and succinct, without added ornaments. He had a clear idea of what he wanted to say, though inconsistencies appear as his mood varied, or as his argument led him into difficult places. His ideas provoked many replies which pervade English literature for long after his death; but such exercises in psychology and metaphysics belong rather to the history of philosophy than of literature. The doctrine of Hobbes is not optimistic. "When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is War, which provideth for every man, by victory or death." The idea is that expressed in a Greek poem "the Cypria," of about 750 b.c. Hobbes thought himself an authority on Epic poetry, among other things, and especially commended, in Davenant's "Gondibert," the really pleasing passage which describes the birth of love in the heart of Bertha. Hobbes expanded his ideas about the Epic in his translation of Homer. We do not know what he thought of "Paradise Lost".
Izaak Walton.
Born near Stafford in 1593, Izaak Walton went to London, lived in Fleet Street, two doors west of Chancery Lane, and was in business as an ironmonger. Donne the poet was then vicar of the neighbouring church of St. Dunstan's; Walton and he became friends: Walton was also intimate with Hales of Eton, Sir Henry Wotton, Bishop King, and Ben Jonson. In 1640 Walton's brief life of Donne, already quoted, was published. In 1651 Walton had the dangerous task of carrying secretly to a Royalist in London the smaller George jewel of Charles II, after the King's crushing defeat at Worcester, on 3 September. A Royalist and a sound Churchman (his wives were of the families of Cranmer and Ken), Walton's natural cheerfulness, his sincere religion, and his habit of angling "with N. and R. Roe," were needed to keep him from melancholy in the evil days of 1642-1660. But he, for a writer of his age, is strangely free from the melancholy then in fashion, and his "Compleat Angler," first published in 1653, might have been composed in days of idyllic peace. This famous work is too well known to need description or praise. The natural history is as fantastic as that of Euphues, the instructions on angling come from a mere fisher with bait, but the beauty of the style, the sweetness of the thought, keep the book fresh as with lavender and rosemary. To later editions Charles Cotton and Colonel Venables added practical instruction on fly fishing, up stream, in clear water like Cotton's own Dove in Derbyshire. The brief biographies by Walton of Donne, Wotton, Herbert, Hooker, and Sanderson are little masterpieces in their manner.
Walton lived in old age at Farnham with Bishop Morley and then at Winchester where he doubtless fished with worm in the pellucid streams of the Itchen. Walton's connexion with a pastoral poem "Thealma and Clearchus," is of doubtful nature. Was he author, or did he edit the work of Chalkhill? He died at the age of 90, and is buried in Winchester Cathedral. Byron is almost the only critic who has thrown a stone at the kind memory of Izaak Walton, to which Wordsworth devoted a sonnet.
John Bunyan.
The two writers of this period whose works now come most closely home "to men's bosoms and business" are John Bunyan and Izaak Walton. Copies of the little plain volumes clad in sheepskin which they published at a shilling or eighteen-pence, fetch spurns like £1000, more or less, when they come into the market. The masterpieces of both are constantly being republished, and though perhaps few people have a fairly good knowledge of the contents of "The Pilgrim's Progress," or "The Compleat Angler," yet most people have had these works in their hands.
The popularity of Bunyan, the non-resisting ever-preaching Dissenter; and of Walton, the angling Churchman, rests to a great extent on their characters. Differing as they did about the right of Bishops to exist, and about Justification by Faith, could the two men have met, and kept off these topics, they would "have had good talk". Each had abundant humour, each was a keen observer of Nature and of human nature, each was a lover of peace, each had a modest little fount of poetry within him. Of each it may be said, as of Scott, "he is such a friendly writer," and each is plain and intelligible, Bunyan had no artifices of style, though Walton sometimes, by study, is able to rival the harmonies of Sip Thomas Browne.
Bunyan, who came of a very old landed family which had steadily lost all its lands to the last acre, was born in a cottage at Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628. He was taught reading and writing; and pursued his father's trade—that recommended by Mr. Dick for David Copperfield,—he was a brasier, or tinker, but not a wandering tinker. In early youth he was a leader in sports and games; you would have said "he wasna the stuff they made Whigs o'". Far from that, a native genius for expression first declared itself in his being "the ungodliest fellow for swearing"—which was not recognized as a literary exercise. He was under arms, like other lads of his age, but we have no reason to suppose that he was ever under fire, and his militia (Parliamentary, probably) was soon disbanded.
In his "Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners" (1666) he writes his religious autobiography; a work composed in prison, to which he was consigned because he would not cease to be instant in preaching. "The Philistines understand me not," he says in his Preface. He writes for lowly devotees, "Have you forgot the Close, the Milk House, the Stable, the Barn, and the like where God did visit your souls,"—with "terrors of conscience and fears of Death and Hell?" Even in his joyous youth, Bunyan had dreamed of "devils and wicked spirits," which probably did not trouble Shakespeare or Walton. At 9 years old he suffered from the nightmares that haunted R. L. Stevenson. His book is the most vivid description possible of the life of an imaginative lad, standing between gross pleasures and terrors of hell. A Voice and an Appearance came to him while playing at a kind of rudimentary cricket: he went on playing, but fell into religious hypochondria. The vividness of his imagination conjured up such scenery as he uses in his great Allegory: he beheld comforting words "that seemed to be writ in great letters," and so at last found consolation in faith.