Note 52 — A LETTER, &c.

Richard Hooker was prevailed upon by Mrs. Churchman, the wife of “a draper of good note,” as honest Isaac Walton calls him, to let her choose a wife for him. “Now,” continues the pleasant biographer, “the wife provided for him was her daughter Joan, who brought him neither beauty nor portion; and for her conditions, they were too like that wife’s, which is by Solomon compared to a dripping house: so that he had no reason to rejoice in the wife of his youth, but rather to say with the holy prophet, ‘Wo is me, that I am constrained to have my habitation in the tents of Kedar’.” Walton’s Life of Hooker.