published. It corrects many mistakes in his ecclesiastical story; but makes more new ones in their stead.-NICOLSON, WILLIAM, 1696-1714, English Historical Library, p. 5.

It is a most fascinating storehouse of gossiping, anecdote, and quaintness; a most delightful medley of interchanged amusement, presenting entertainment as varied as it is inexhaustible.-CROSSLEY, JAMES, 1821, Fuller's Holy and Profane States, Retrospective Review, vol. III, p. 54.

Fuller must be always read with a certain degree of caution; for he was fond of a joke, and often picked up intelligence in a slovenly manner.-DIBDIN, THOMAS FROGNALL, 1824, The Library Companion, note, p. 507.

GENERAL

His writings are very facetious, and (where he is careful) judicious. His "Pisgah Sight" is the exactest; his "Holy War and State," the wittiest; his "Church History," the unhappiest, written in such a time when he could not do the truth right with safety, nor wrong it with honour; and his "Worthies, not finished at his death, the most imperfect. As for his other works, he that shall but read FULLER'S name unto 'them will not think them otherwise but worthy of that praise and respect which the whole nation afforded unto the author. -WINSTANLEY, WILLIAM, 1660, England's Worthies.

The writings of Fuller are usually designated by the title of quaint, and with sufficient reason; for such was his natural bias to conceits, that I doubt not upon most occasions it would have been going out of his way to have expressed himself out of them. But his wit is not always a lumen siccum, a dry faculty of surprising; on the contrary, his conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped in human feeling and passion. Above all, his way of telling a story, for its eager liveliness, and the perpetual running commentary of the narrator happily blended with the narration, is perhaps unequalled.—LAMB, CHARLES, 1811, Specimens from the writings of Fuller.

If ever there was an amusing writer in this world the facetious Thomas Fuller was one. There was in him a combination of those qualities which minister to our entertainment, such as few have ever

possessed in an equal degree. He was, first of all, a man of extensive and multifarious reading; of great and digested knowledge, which an extraordinary retentiveness of memory preserved ever ready for use, and considerable accuracy of judgment enabled him successfully to apply. He was also, if we may use the term, a very great anecdote-monger; an indefatigable collector of the traditionary stories related of eminent characters, to gather which, his biographers inform us, he would listen contentedly for hours to the garrulity of the aged country people whom he encountered in his progresses with the king's army. With such plenitude and diversity of information, he had an inexhaustible fund for the purposes of illustration, and this he knew well how to turn to the best advantage. Unlike his tasteless contemporaries he did not bring forth or display his erudition on unnecessary occasions or pile extract on extract and cento on cento with industry as misapplied as it was disgusting. . . . So well does he vary his treasures of memory and observation, so judiciously does he interweave his anecdotes, quotations, and remarks, that it is impossible to conceive a more delightful chequer-work of acute thought and apposite illustration, of original and extracted sentiment, than is presented in his works. As a story-teller, he was most consummately felicitous. The relation which we have seen for the hundredth time, when introduced in his productions, assumes all the freshness of novelty, and comes out of his hands instinct with fresh life and glowing with vitality and spirit.-CROSSLEY, JAMES, 1821, Fuller's Holy and Profane States, Retrospective Review, vol. III, pp. 50, 51.

Next to Shakspeare, I am not certain whether Thomas Fuller, beyond all other writers, does not excite in me the sense and emotion of the marvellous; the degree in which any given faculty or combination of faculties is possessed and manifested, so far surpassing what one would have thought possible in a single mind, as to give one's admiration the flavour and quality of wonder! Wit was the staff and substance of Fuller's intellect. It was the element, the earthen base, the material which he worked in, and this very circumstance has defrauded him of his due praise for the practical wisdom of

the thoughts, for the beauty and variety of the truths, into which he shaped the stuff. Fuller was incomparably the most sensible, the least prejudiced, great man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men. He is a very voluminous writer, and yet, in all his numerous volumes on so many different subjects, it is scarcely too much to say, that you will hardly find a page in which some one sentence out of every three does not deserve to be quoted. for itself as motto or as maxim.-COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR, 1829, Miscellanies, ed. Ashe, p. 327.

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Fuller is one of the few voluminous authors who is never tedious. .. Of all the forms of wit, Fuller affects that of the satirist least. Though he can be caustic, and sometimes is so, he does not often indulge the propensity; and when he does. it is without bitterness-a sly irony, a good-humoured gibe, at which even its object could hardly have helped laughing, is all he ventures upon. So exuberant is Fuller's wit, that, as his very melancholy is mirthful, so his very wisdom wears motley. But it is wisdom notwithstanding; nor are there many authors, in whom we shall find so much solid sense and practical sagacity, in spite of the grotesque disguise in which they masque themselves. ROGERS, HENRY, 1842, Life and Writings of Thomas Fuller, Edinburgh Review, vol. 74, pp. 334, 340, 343.

Of a sanguine, happy, easy temperament, a jolly Protestant father confessor, and this attracted him to the side of the laughing muse. Yet he abounds in quiet, beautiful touches both of poetry and pathos.-GILFILLAN, GEORGE, 1855, A Third Gallery of Portraits, p. 393.

One of the liveliest and yet, in the inmost heart of him, one of the most serious writers one can meet with. I speak of this writer partly because there is no one who is so resolute that we should treat him as a friend, and not as a solemn dictator. By some unexpected jest, or comical turn of expression, he disappoints your purpose of receiving his words as if they were fixed in print, and asserts his right to talk with you, and convey his subtle wisdom in his own quaint and peculiar dialect.-MAURICE, FREDERICK DENISON, 1856-74, The Friendship of Books and Other Lectures, ed. Hughes, p. 18.

The wise old Fuller, whom no lover of

wit, truth, beauty, and goodness can ever tire of reading.-MARSH, GEORGE P., 1859, Lectures on the English Language, First Series, p. 58.

He is the most singular writer, full of verbal quibbling and quaintness of all kinds, but by far the most amusing and engaging of all the rhetoricians of this school, inasmuch as his conceits are rarely mere elaborate feats of ingenuity, but are usually informed either by a strong spirit of very peculiar humor and drollery, or sometimes even by a warmth and depth of feeling, of which too, strange as it may appear, the oddity of his phraseology is often a not ineffective exponent. He was certainly one of the greatest and truest wits that ever lived: he is witty not by any sort of effort at all, but as it were in spite of himself, or because he cannot help it.

. . No man ever (in writing at least) made so many jokes, good, bad, and indifferent; be the subject what it may, it does not matter; in season and out of season he is equally facetious; he cannot let slip an occasion of saying a good thing any more than a man who is tripped can keep himself from falling; the habit is as irresistible with him as the habit of breathing; and yet there is probably neither an ill-natured nor a profane witticism to be found in all that he has written. It is the sweetest-blooded wit that was ever infused into man or book. And how strong and weighty, as well as how gentle and beautiful, much of his writing is!-CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. II, pp. 65, 72.

Quaint but full and sufficient.-FRISWELL, JAMES HAIN, 1869, Essays on English Writers, p. 12.

For one reason or another Fuller has become a kind of privileged pet amongst those traders in literary curiosities whose favourite hunting ground is amongst the great writers of the seventeenth century. He is the spoilt child of criticism whose most audacious revolts against the respectable laws of taste have an irrestible claim. Some of their eulogies rather tax our credulity. He was the

most buoyant of mankind; and if he ever knew what it was to be melancholy, he could find relief in lamentations so lively as to sound like an effusion of exuberant

spirits. The wonder is that we feel this boyish exhilaration to be significant of true feeling. Some men shed tears when they are deeply moved; Fuller pours forth a string of quibbles. It is a singular idiosyncrasy which inverts the conventional modes of expressing devotion, and makes jokes, good, bad, and indifferent, do duty for sighs. But nobody should read Fuller who cannot more or less understand the frame of mind to which such fantastic freaks are congenial; and those who do will learn that, if in one sense he is the most childlike, in another he is amongst the most manly writers. He enjoys a sort of rude intellectual health, which enables him to relish childish amusements to the end of his days; and it is difficult to imagine a more enviable accomplishment, though it must be admitted that it leads to some rather startling literary phenomena.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1872, Hours in a Library, Cornhill Maga zine, vol. 25, pp. 33, 44

The Quaintness of the seventeenth century is commonly linked with the name of Thomas Fuller, not because he is the most glaring example, but rather because he is one of the few high class writers in whom this quality is conspicuous. For in fact, although quaintness is best known to the modern reader through his writings, yet he does not afford a true example of the fault of quaintness. His quaintness is a sort, a droll sort perhaps, of beauty; because the language is a true vesture to the thought, and Fuller is quaint in his very thought. The quaintness which is blamable rises when a writer is more curious about his diction than careful to have something to say before he covers paper with decorated words. The Quaintness of the Seventeenth century is a phenomenon of the same nature as the Euphuism of the Sixteenth. It is like the secular return of an epidemic enthusiasm.—EARLE, JOHN, 1890, English Prose, p. 452.

Fuller perhaps has, and it may possibly be due to a sort of feeling of this that, though he has never wanted for fervent admirers, they seem always rather to have shrunk from paying him the greatest and the most necessary, if the most trying, honour that can be paid to an author by issuing a complete edition of his works. There are many curious

contradictions in Fuller's character, both personal and literary, and it is not impossible that the presence of them communicates to his personality and his literature the almost unmatched piquancy which both possess, and which have never failed to attract fit persons. A Puritan Cavalier (Dr. Jessopp calls him a Puritan, and though I should hardly go so far myself, there is no doubt that Fuller leaned far more to the extreme Protestant side than most of his comrades in loyalty), a man of the sincerest and most unaffected piety, who never could resist a joke, an early member of the exact or antiquarian school of historians, who was certainly not a very profound or wide scholar, and who constantly laid himself open to the animadversions of others by his defects in scholarship-Fuller is a most appetising bundle of contradictions. But his contradictions undoubtedly sometimes disgust; and perhaps even some almost insatiable lovers of "the humour of it" may occasionally think that he carries the humour of it too far. SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1893, English Prose, ed. Craik, vol. II, p. 374.

Without endorsing the extravagant praise of Coleridge, we must acknowledge that the wit of Fuller was amazing, if he produced too many examples of it in forms a little too desultory for modern taste. GOSSE, EDMUND 1897, Short History of Modern English Literature, p. 152.

Of all our many English writers whom it is customary to designate as quaint, perhaps Fuller exhibits a quaintness which savours least of antiquity, of affectations. now quite obsolete.-TOVEY, DUNCAN C., 1897, Reviews and Essays in English Literature, p. 39.

As a theological writer, Fuller is distinguished by earnest piety and indomitable cheerfulness rather than by sublimity of thought or intensity of emotion. Though his moderate attitude on the burning questions of the day did not entirely satisfy either of the great religious parties, it enabled him to continue his ministry through all the vicissitudes of the Commonwealth without any of those vacillations of principle by which other men purchased the toleration of the ruling powers. His temperament unfitted him for entering into the war of invective and vituperation that was raging around him. He rarely displays either enthusiasm or

indignation, preferring to interest and amuse rather than to rouse or convince. The homely imagery, of which his sermons and devotional writings are full, laid him open to the charge of levity; but though

his similes are often grotesque, they are seldom actually ludicrous, while their very incongruity sometimes gives an added force to the comparison.MASTERMAN, J. H. B., 1897, The Age of Milton, p. 172.

PERSONAL

He was a person endowed with singular gifts, of a sharp and pregnant wit, solid and clear judgment. In his younger years he was accounted an excellent poet, but very conceited and pragmatical, in his elder, a better historian, a noted preacher, and a ready or extemporanean speaker.WOOD, ANTHONY, 1691-1721, Athena Oxonienses, vol. 11, f. 279.

LIFE OF LAUD

1644

Laud's Life has been described by Peter Heylin, D. D.; the man known usually in Presbyterian Polemics by the name of "Lying Peter." He is an alert, logical, metaphorical, most swift, ingenious man; alive every inch of him, Episcopal to the very finger-ends. This present writer has read the old dim folio, every word of it, with faithful industry, with truest wish to understand. A hope did dawn on him that he of all Adam's posterity would be the last that undertook such a trouble; some one of Adam's sons was fated to be the last; why not he? It had been too sad a task otherwise. For if the truth must be told, this unfortunate last reader found that properly he did not "understand" it in the least, that though the thing lay plain, patent as the turnpike highway, no man would ever more understand it. For the mournful truth is, that the human brain in this stage of its progress, refuses any longer to concern itself with Peter Heylin. The result was, no increase of knowledge at all. Read him not, O reader of this nineteenth century, let no pedant

persuade you to read him. Spectres and air-phantos of altars in the East, halfpaces, communion-rails, shovel-hatteries, and mummeries and genuflexions; I for one, O Peter, have forever lost the talent of taking any interest in them, this way or that. As good to say it free out. My sight strains itself looking at them; discerns them to be verily phantoms, airwoven, brain-woven; disowned by Nature, noxious to health and life, - dreary as an aged cobweb full of dust and dead flies. Peter, my friend, it is enough to sit two centuries as an incubus upon the human soul; thou wouldst not continue it into the third century? Thou art requested in terms of civilty to disappear. Incubuses have one duty to do: withdraw. Were Peter's Book well burnt and not a copy of it left, this therefore were the balance of accounts: human knowledge where it was, and two weeks of time and misery saved to many men. On these terms, this last reader will not grudge having read. -CARLYLE, THOMAS, 1844-49-98, Historical Sketches of Noble Persons and Events in the Reigns of James I. and Charles I., p. 274.

We must pay our tribute, however, to the contemporary historian, to the vivid, amusing, clever Heylin. Heylin was one of those persons whom Laud picked up in the course of his administration (as he did many others), and set to work in the Church cause. He wrote books and pamphlets when Laud wanted them, and supplied the Archbishop with university. and clerical information. It was Laud's

a

character to be most good-natured and familiar with his subordinates-with any who worked under him, and did what he told them; and Heylin thoroughly enjoyed and relished his good graces. There is an amusing under-stream of self-congratulation throughout his biography, at his participation of the great man's patronage. He seems to have been occasionally told secrets and let behind the scenes matter of great pride to him. He communicates the information, with a kind of sly, invisible smirk in the background, and a nudge under the table to the reader to remind him of the Archbishop's cleverness, not forgetting the biographer's. The former would not have been particularly obliged, on one or two occasions, for the candid display of his strategics, and bits of necessary statecraft, in his devoted admirer's pages.MOZLEY, J. B., 1845-78, Archbishop Laud, Essays Historical and Theological, vol. I, p. 107.

GENERAL

(1) I knew him a man of able parts and learning; God sanctify both to his Glory and the Church's good! (2) Of an eager spirit, with him of whom it was said, Quicquid voluit, valde voluit. (3) Of a tart and smart style, endeavouring to down with all which stood betwixt him and his opinion. (4) Not over dutiful in his language to the Fathers of the Church (what then may children expect of him?), if contrary in judgment to him. Lastly, Lastly, and chiefly: One, the edge of whose keenness is not taken off by the death of his adversary; witness his writing against the Archbishops of York and Armagh [who both died in 1656]. The fable tells me that the tanner was the worst of all masters to his cattle, as who would not only load them soundly whilst living, but tan their hides when dead; and none could blame one if unwilling to exasperate such a pen, which, if surviving, would prosecute his adversary into his grave. The premises made me, though not servilely fearful (which, praise God, I am not of any writer) yet generally cautious not to give him any personal provocation, knowing that though both our pens were long, the world was wide enough for them without crossing each other.-FULLER, THOMAS, 1659, The Appeal of Injured Innocence.

His knowledge in history and divinity

was extensive; but he wrote with more ease than elegance; and his memory, which was very extraordinary, was better than his judgment. his judgment. He is not free from the leaven and acrimony of party-prejudice. The generality of his writings are in no great esteem at present; but his "Help to History," which is a work of great utility, deserves particular commendation. -GRANGER, JAMES, 1769-1824, Biographical History of England, vol. v, p. 40.

Heylin, in his history of the Puritans and the Presbyterians, blackens them for political devils. He is the Spagnolet of history, delighting himself with horrors at which the painter himself must have started. He tells of their "oppositions" to monarchical and episcopal government; their "innovations" in the church; and their "embroilments" of the kingdoms. The sword rages in their hands; treason, sacrilege, plunder; while "more of the blood of Englishmen had poured like water within the space of four years, than had been shed in the civil wars of York and Lancaster, in four centuries!"-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1791 1824, "Political Religionism," Curiosities of Literature.

A party writer, to be read with caution. He perverts and misrepresents.--BICKERSTETH, EDWARD, 1844, The Christian Student.

As an historian, he displays too much of the spirits of a partisan and bigot, and stands among the defenders of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny. His works, though now almost forgotten, were much read in the seventeenth century, and portions of them may still be perused with pleasure. -CHAMBERS, ROBERT, 1876, Cyclopædia of English Literature, ed. Carruthers.

Heylyn was a man of undoubted sincerity, of quick and active, if somewhat superficial, intellect, and of a temper which found satisfaction only in controversy. If, in his triumph, he often pressed the advantage hard against his antagonists, he accepted, with undaunted spirit, the fate of the conquered, and throughout his life he neither gave nor asked for quarter. His memory was enormous, and his learning various, although ill digested and while he grasped clearly and tenaciously the principles of Laud's policy, and frequently had the best of his antagonists in arguments, he was without. judgment, imagination, or any sense of