ABSTRACT
Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler, wrote biographies of his friends, the poets John Donne and George Herbert. Each of the Lives is marked by a generous and appreciative attitude toward the subject. The books are models of charity in thought and they throw light on the spirit and methods of religious benevolence in England in the first half of the seventeenth century. Mercy, forbearance and kindness, and humility are among the qualities seventeenth-century writers associated with charity. Cervantes, speaking through his hero Don Quixote, makes virtue and charity the marks of gentility. In a chapter headed "one of the most important chapters in the whole history," Don Quixote tells his niece and housekeeper the pleasure of wealth comes not from its possession, but from spending it, and spending it well. Anthologists attribute "Charity begins at home" to Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne, a physician in Norwich, England.
