"Holmes's Lives" is a series of classic English biographies, edited and introduced by Richard Holmes. In this series, Holmes sets out to recover the great forgotten tradition of English biography writing and to reaffirm the enduring excitement of classic non-fiction. Donne and Herbert are well-remembered as great English religious and metaphysical poets, but all five of the lives examined in this book, perhaps the earliest pieces of "professional" biography in English, were equally fascinating to Izaak Walton. Walton was a London linen-draper by trade, a fly-fisherman by inclination and a biographer by inspiration. He was not interested in great political leaders, soldiers, idealogues or religious martyrs. Instead he produced these studies in mildness and eccentricity of a particular Anglican and idyllic kind, against the backdrop of the highly disturbed and violent background of the English civil war. They redefine a new sense of Englishness emerging after the trauma of the Cromwellian revolution.