Note 392 — Chapter XI

The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1806), I. 406. If Burton, “that universal plunderer” has cribbed from Dame Juliana Berners her eloquent eulogy on the secondary pleasures of angling, this book, in turn, till its resurrection in the eighteenth century was ruthlessly pillaged without acknowledgment. Warton, Milton, 2nd edition, p. 94, suggests that Milton seems to have borrowed the subject of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, together with some thoughts and expressions, from a poem prefixed to the book, while a writer in The Angler’s Note Book, March 31, 1880, believes that “Walton probably drew the inspiration of his Angler’s song from the wonderful storehouse of this quaint and original author.”