TO HIS VERY WORTHY FRIEND

MR. IZAAK WALTON,

Com his writing and publishing the LIFE of the venerable and judicious

MR. RICHARD HOOKER.

I.

HAIL, sacred mother! British Church, all bail!
From whose fruitful loins have sprung

Of pious sons so great a throng

That Heav'n t'oppose their force, of strength did fail, And let the mighty conqu'rors o'er Almighty arms prevail ; How art thou chang'd from what thou wert a late! When destitute and quite forlorn,

And scarce a child of thousands with thee left to mourn, Thy veil all rent, and all thy garments torn:

With tears thou didst bewail thine own and children's fate.

The church of England emerging from those dreadful calamities in which she had been involved by the artifices of those men, who, under the pretence of seal for the cause of religion, medrated her entire destr ction, is here not unajity partraved under the figure of an affluted paret.t.......

“Her ved all rent, and all her garments turn."

She was then the s'ject of c'egia lamentation. The scene is ha,qa'y changed; and she is here addressed in the language of peze and exulat. Wh

T↓

'Twas a bold work the captiv'd to redeem,
And not so only, but th' oppress'd to raise
(Our aged mother) to that due esteem
She had and merited in her younger days.
When primitive zeal and piety

Were all her laws and policy,

And decent worship kept the mean

Its too wide stretch'd extremes between,
The rudely scrupulous and extravagantly vain-
This was the work of Hooker's pen.

With judgment, candour, and such learning writ,
Matter and words so exactly fit

That were it to be done agen,

Expected 'twould be as its answer hitherto has been.

RITORNATA.

To Chelsea, song; there tell thy master's friend
The church is Hooker's debtor-Hooker his;
And strange 'twould be if he should glory miss
For whom two such most powerfully contend:
Bid him cheer up, the day's his own,
And he shall never die,

Who, after sev'nty's past and gone,

Can all th' assaults of age defy;

• The residence of Morley Bishop of Winchester, whose liberality appro priated to the use of his successors a magnificent house at Chelsea, which had purchased for four thousand pounds. He obtained an act of Parliament, by which that house was declared to be within the diocese of Winchestre, Such was his known benefience, that on his promotion to the see of Winchester, Charles II. 'said of him, "That notwithstanding its vast reveniæ he would "be never the richer for it."

VERSES TO MR. IZAAK WALTON.

Is master still of so much youthful heat,
A child so perfect and so sprightly to beget.

BENSTEAD, HANTS,

March 10, 16%.

299

SAM. WOODFORD'.

The author of these verses, Dr. SAMUEL WOODFORD, was born in 1636, and having been a commoner of Wadham College, in Oxford, he took his first degree in arts, and afterward removed to the Inner Temp, where he was chamber-fellow with Mr. Flatman, the poet. In 1669, he was ordained by Morley Bishop of Winchester, and being created Doctor of Divinity by a diploma from Archbishop Sancroft, was preferred to a prebend in the church at Winchester. He composed a Paraphrase on the Palins, commended by Mr. Rahard Baxter, as also on the Canticles, with many original poems and translating from the Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Italian writers. He died in 1*00,

(Wood's Athen. O1.)