INTRODUCTION.
I _Evelyn & his literary contemporaries Isaac Walton & Samuel Pepys._ Among the prose writers of the second half of the seventeenth century John Evelyn holds a very distinguished position.

The age of the Restoration and the Revolution is indeed rich in many names that have won for themselves an enduring place in the history of English literature.

South, Tillotson, and Barrow among theologians, Newton in mathematical science, Locke and Bentley in philosophy and classical learning, Clarendon and Burnet in history, L'Estrange, Butler, Marvell and Dryden in miscellaneous prose, and Temple as an essayist, have all made their mark by prose writings which will endure for all time.

But the names which stand out most prominently in popular estimation as authors of great masterpieces in the prose of this period are certainly those of John Bunyan, John Evelyn, and Izaak Walton.

And along with them Samuel Pepys is also well entitled to be ranked as a great contemporary writer, though he was at pains to try and ensure his being permitted to remain free from the publicity of authorship, for such time at least as the curious might allow his Diary to remain hidden in the cipher he employed.
With the great though untrained genius of Bunyan none of these other three celebrated prose authors of this time has anything in common.