In the exciting days of the first Charles and of the Commonwealth, the life even of a clergyman was subject to danger and adventure, if he happened to be a partisan. Fuller, the son of the Rector of All Winkle, in Northamptonshire, bred up in the usual course of school and college education, and appointed prebend of Salisbury and vicar of Broad Windsor at the age of twentythree, spent the first thirty-three years of his life in the greatest imaginable freedom from care. Up to 1640 he was unmolested in his quiet existence-varying his parish duties with the literary plans that served to fill his hours of leisure. But by 1640 the political atmosphere became troubled; and Fuller was called from his retreat to uphold in the pulpits of the metropolis the duty of obedience to the King. He spent a year with the royal forces in the character of chaplain to Lord Hopton. Growing weary of this irregular life, in 1644 he withdrew to Exeter, and busied himself with his compositions. On the capitulation of Exeter, he removed to London. In 1655 he received from the Protector special permission to preach. He lived to see the Restoration, but did not long enjoy the reward given to his loyalty, dying on the 15th of August 1661.

His 'Holy War,' the first of his works, was written in the quiet of the parsonage at Broad Windsor. His other works1 he com

1 The list of his principal works is as follow: History of the Holy War,' 1640; 'The Holy State,' 1642; 'Good Thoughts in Bad Times,' 1644-45; The Profane State,' 1648; Good Thoughts in Worse Times,' 1649; 'A Pisgah Sight

posed when his life was more unsettled; though during the excitement of the Civil War his energies were so far from being absorbed in the struggle, that he was quietly occupied in collecting materials for his Worthies,' and in laying up a heterogeneous store of anecdotes.

In person1 Fuller seems to have been rather over the middle height, full-bodied, with light curling hair, florid complexion, and clear blue eyes. He had an erect easy carriage, as was natural in a man of confident good spirits. He was careless in his dress.

He had an astonishing memory. The anecdotes of his powers are probably, like all anecdotes of the kind, not a little overcoloured; still they show what an impression he made on those that knew him. "It is said that he could repeat five hundred strange words after twice hearing, and could make use of a sermon verbatim if he once heard it. He undertook once, in passing to and fro from Temple Bar to the farthest point of Cheapside, to tell at his return every sign as it stood in order on both sides of the way, repeating them either backwards or forwards; and he did it exactly." His quickness in discovering resemblance was no less remarkable. This power, however, was not exercised on subjects that test intellectual strength; he did not strain his intellect like a great rhetorician to find telling arguments, nor like a great poet to find harmonious images. He wandered at will over the great stores accumulated by his memory, and amused himself in picking out incongruities, playing upon names, making odd comparisons, and suchlike ingenious freaks.

The chief destination of his scholarship is to tickle the sense of the ludicrous; no writer in our literature, except perhaps Burton, applies so much scholarship to so singular a purpose. "Wit," Coleridge said, was the stuff and substance of Fuller's intellect."

His outward appearance was, to use a phrase of his own, "hung out as a sign" of his disposition; the cheerful, careless, confident nature of the man was legible in his countenance. Though he lived in times of fierce excitement, and was violently thrust out from his quiet home by the Puritans, and not permitted to take even his books with him, yet he shows no stronger feeling towards the triumphant party than sly humorous ridicule of individual sectaries. His attachment to his friends was equally moderate; he probably had a bias for the Church of England, but he does

of Palestine,' 1650; Abel Redivivus' (a Martyrology), 1651; Church History of Britain,' 1656; Mixed Contemplations in Better Times, 1660; 'Worthies of England (posthumous), 1662. Fuller may be said to have been the first "writer of books "by profession. He acknowledges that one of his objects in writing was-"to get some honest profit to himself."

1 It is difficult to make out the personal appearance of some eminent English divines. Even their good-looks are overrated by one party and underrated by

another.

not uphold the fame of her champions with anything approaching jealous impatience of contradiction. His eye seems to have been ever open to the comic aspects both of friend and of foe. He made a habit of looking at the world through a humorous me-dium. He conveys abundance of solid information, but his information has the oddest possible frame of witty nonsense.

Confident and careless-careless in the sense of rising humorously superior to care-Fuller was not an idle man, disposed, like one of Charles Lamb's genial borrowing fellows, to live upon the generosity of his friends. He took no earnest part in the fierce contest of his times, but the list of his works is ample proof of his capacity for honest industry. He puts comical wrappages about his information, but it is unimpeachably substantial, and could not have been procured without steady application.

He was born a Churchman, and continued a Churchman; yet so moderate were his sentiments, that he was suspected of a leaning to Puritanism. Before the outbreak of the Civil War he preached in London, and offended the party of the Parliament by advising submission to royal authority. When the rupture came, he fled to the king at Oxford, and there offended the royalists by advising conciliation.

ELEMENTS OF STYLE.

Vocabulary.-A good many archaisms occur in Fuller, though upon the whole he writes with a more modern phrase than any clergyman and scholar of the time. In his easy manner he would probably use the first word that came to hand. We meet with such obsolete words as 66 authenticalness," ""cowardness" (cowardliness), “diurnal" (journal), "extempory" (extemporary), “duncical" (stupid), "jocularly" (jocular), "farced" (stuffed), "misoclere (hater of the clergy), "un-understood," "volant" (volatile). Such of his words as "minutary" (analogous to momentary), and "orderable," in the sense of submissive to orders, might with advantage have passed into general use.

In Fuller's time English had not yet settled down to the present form of inflections. He is not at all uniform in his mode of inflecting sometimes he uses the modern forms, sometimes there stray across his page such forms as "took" for taken, "bleeded' (bled), " understanden," "understanded" (understood), "strick," "stroke," "strook" (struck), "sprongen" (sprung), (sprung), "sungen (sung). Sometimes he uses "his" instead of the possessive affix, "King James his reign." On one occasion he gives whole a comparative "wholler."

He mingled so much with the world, holding intercourse with all classes, and being a good listener to every form of garrulity,

that he uses a larger admixture of Saxon than his more recluse contemporaries. Besides, as we shall see, the use of very homely words is one of his instruments of ridicule.

Sentences. His sentences are not involved and intricate. In this respect he is much superior to Hooker, Taylor, or any theological writer of his time. The following, in his Church History, on the plan taken by James I. to reduce the power of the English nobility, is rather an exception; he has comparatively few so loose and involved as this:

"But following the counsel of his English secretary there present, he soon found a way to abate the formidable greatness of the English nobility, by conferring honour upon many persons; whereby nobility was spread so broad, that it became very thin, which much lessened the ancient esteem thereof."

It must be allowed, however, that in a full statement, or in an argument pursued at any length, he is not so much more skilled in avoiding intricacies, than his contemporaries. He is orderly chiefly because he is brief-usually trying to despatch a statement of fact or an argument as succinctly as possible. He is seldom drawn into complicated statements by a desire of saying too much. That he studied expressly to avoid the cumbrous effect of formally indicating connection and dependence, may be inferred from his Prefaces, where he is put upon his mettle, and writes with more Thus

care.

"Seamen observe, that the water is the more troubled the nearer they draw on to the land, because broken by repercussion from the shore. I am sensible of the same danger, the nearer I approach our times, and the end of this History."

Most writers before the Restoration would have thrown these two sentences into one.

He is a great master of short pointed sentences. His pages are strewn with pithy sayings, that stick in the mind like proverbs. Almost every paragraph is preceded by a short sentence giving the pith of the whole. Thus in his Essay on Tombs, he has the following aphorisms: "Tombs are the clothes of the dead. A grave is but a plain suit, and a rich monument is one embroidered." "Tombs ought in some sort to be proportioned, not to the wealth, but deserts of the party interred." "The shortest, plainest, and truest epitaphs are the best." "To want a grave is the cruelty of the living, not the misery of the dead." "A good memory is the best

monument."

Paragraphs. He often digresses to tell an anecdote, but is sensible of his transgression. Sometimes he apologises, and tries to make out a connection; at other times he throws himself on the reader's forbearance. Thus "Reader, whether smiling or frowning, forgive the digression."

But there is this to be said for Fuller's digressions, they never confuse. He lightens his subject by numerous paragraph breaks, made with considerable though not perfect accuracy, and-which is his main preventive of confusion-with every considerable change of subject, he gives a summary italic heading, and makes a fresh

start.

Figures of Speech.-His style is thickly interspersed with ingenious similitudes. "The chief diseases of the fancy," he says himself, are either that it is too wild and high-soaring, or else too low and grovelling, or else too desultory and over-voluble." The last is his own "disease." Ingenious as is the play of his fancy, it is much more luxuriant than would be tolerated now, and did not escape censure even in his own day.

His figures, like Bacon's, are taken largely from his own observations of common life, only, unlike Bacon's, they are nearly all, in accordance with the author's ruling tendency, calculated to make the reader laugh or smile. So far from exalting the object they are applied to, their purpose is to set it in a whimsical light; the most serious subjects are set off with odd similitudes, and the reader is tempted to laugh where propriety requires him to be grave. The following are one or two examples. Of the good bishop he says:—

"He is careful and happy in suppressing of heresies and schisms. He distinguisheth of schismatics as physicians do of leprous people: some are infectious, others not; some are active to seduce others, others quietly enjoy their opinions in their own consciences. To use force before people

are fairly taught the truth, is to knock a nail into a board without wimbling a hole for it, which then either not enters, or turns crooked, or splits the wood it pierceth."

Again

"Let us be careful to provide rest for our souls, and our bodies will provide rest for themselves. And let us not be herein like unto gentlewomen, who care not to keep the inside of the orange, but candy and preserve only the outside."

And, condemning the use of high-flown language with inferior matter, he says—

"Some men's speeches are like the high mountains in Ireland, having a dirty bog in the top of them."

He advises the young writer to take advice of a faithful friend :

"When thou pennest an oration, let him have the power of the Index Expurgatorius' to expunge what he pleaseth; and do not thou, like a fond mother, cry if the child of thy brain be corrected for playing the wanton."

Fuller himself "plays the wanton" in similitudes so often that we see a touch of the ludicrous in nearly every comparison that he