padding noise." Off the coast lay the fancies with which the book was thickly islands where the brave Captain Gulliver sprinkled. "Jest not with the two-edged discovered a whole nation of more amiable sword of God's word," says Fuller elseGoliahs; and closely bordering that were where. "Will nothing serve thee to washi wild districts where Sinbad found valleys thy hands in but the font? or to drink full of diamonds, where Aladdin got into healths in but the Church chalice?" And trouble about the roc's egg, and where it though, even in his most solemn moods, he was held to be a crime to make cream- has not been quite able to act up to his tarts without pepper. That region and own principles, and to refrain from a jest, the world of daily life were simply incom- or even a downright pun, he generally mensurable; they could no more come in preserves an ostensibly grave countenance contact than De Quincey's Kingdom of in the Pisgah-Sight. There is always a Gombroon or Hartley Coleridge's Tigro- quiet twinkle in his eye, but there is sylvania could impinge upon France or little downright facetiousness. The irreGermany. It was a childish ignorance; pressible spirit of fun with which he must and yet, to parody the poet's remark, it is have been at times full almost to bursting not very much pleasure to know myself to does not find open vent, though that very be nearer to Palestine than when I was a circumstance, it may be, forces it to leaven boy. When the infantile mind refuses to the whole narrative, and cast the most believe that the camel of the Zoological commonplace statement into an epigramGardens is of the same breed as the camel on which Rebecca rode, it is trying to do honour to the objects of its romance by placing them in a purely ideal world, cut off from all prosaic associations with buns and country cousins. It must, however, be admitted that this region, to which access was only obtainable on Sundays in the physical conformation of the counhad some more questionable peculiarities. try? Fuller speaks in another of his books of matic shape. Perhaps it was pardonable in a childish reader to attribute these strange eccentricities of style to some occult quality in the soil of Palestine. If the history was meant to provide us with examples, was it very singular that the strangest meanings should be lurking even That error has of course been dispelled. a certain family of Shugburys in War- Further experience has proved beyond a wickshire, who had stars in their coat-of-doubt that people can write about Palesarms; whilst similar stars, as he tells us, tine without being amusing; and in its are found in stones within their own manor wider acquaintance with Fuller has reof Shugbury: a circumstance upon which vealed that amazing wit, of which few men he moralizes after his fashion, pointing out ever possessed a more abundant share, and that the Divine arms, " Power, wisdom, and the blaze of which has perhaps blinded goodness, are to be seen in every creature some of his readers to many other good in the world, from worms to men." Pales- qualities which he undoubtedly possessed. tine, meaning, of course, the Sunday Pales- Strange, indeed, as it appears, there has tine seemed to be full of such natural been at least one adult human being who enigmas. Not merely its animals, but its has lost sight of the wit in admiration of very woods and rocks and rivers had an the more solid merits. Not many years Esopian faculty of embodying fables- ago an industrious writer published a life and still more frequently of indulging in of Fuller. It is evidently the fruit of careapparently purposeless oddities. The salt- ful research, and genuine love for the hero ness of the Dead Sea received quite a new of the story; and yet if it were not for flavour when it appeared that it "would two circumstances, the reader might go kill that Apocrypha dragon, which Danieils from one end to the other without discovsaid to have choked with pitch, fat, and hair ing that Fuller was a wittier writer than if he should be so adventurous as to drink Baxter or Archbishop Usher, or any of the of the waters thereof." There was somehow sound divines the contents of whose folios nothing shocking to our sense of propriety are as solid as their bindings. One cirin these and innumerable other quaint cumstance is that the biography contains many quotations, and that the most per- be preserved chiefly by his wit, however admirable it might be in quality. And therefore we will hope that it would have gratified Fuller, could he have known that in the second century after his death he would be commemorated as a model of orthodoxy. With that, however, we shall have no further concern; and it will, therefore, be enough to announce to those who care to hear it, that a clergyman of the Church of England considered Fuller to have hit off with marvellous precision the genuine via media; and if it be asked which genuine via media, it can only be replied that the critic belonged to the school of moderate Evangelicals. verse ingenuity can as litle dip into Fuller without bringing up some quaint conceit as a net can be lowered into a shoal of herrings without touching a fish. The other is, that the writer is once or twice compelled to refer to Fuller's facetiousness, with a kind of reluctant shrugging of the shoulders, such as good Dominie Sampson bestowed upon the lively Pleydell. "It is greatly to be regretted," says our friend, "in spite of the beauties with which his Good Thoughts" (one of his most characteristic works)" abounds, that they are in some instances degraded by a quaintness that is never so much out of place as in religious meditations." The simplicity of It is more to the purpose to remark that this criticism is worthy of the Vicar of the history of his life indicates the possesWakefield. There is a degree of impervi- sion of other qualities, which will be adousness to a joke which becomes positively mired by a larger circle. Wit, however loveable. It reminds us of that excellent excellent, cannot be the staple of the inbishop who declared that there were some tellect of any considerable man. If the things in Gulliver's Travels which he could most Attic salt have nothing to flavour, it not bring himself to believe. Fuller too will not afford a very tempting dish. In quaint "in some instances!" He is noth- the case of Fuller, wit in its most fantastic ing if not quaint; quaintness is the very forms, to adopt the metaphor just quoted, element in which he lives and moves and played like summer lightning over the has his being; his name has become insep- sweet and clear waters of sound sensearable from quaintness; he is as distinctly free in a most unusual degree from the the quaint as Hooker the judicious, or slightest admixture of bitterness. He only Crichton, with less reason, the admirable. approaches to satire — though to satire of And the very differentia of Fuller, that the kindliest sort - when an irresistible which distinguishes him from many con- sense of the ludicrous forces him to notice temporaries of equal quaintness, and others the foibles of men whom he loves all the of equal beauty, is, that his beauties are better for their little absurdities. Some indissolubly blended with his quaintness. such feeling, for example, tinges his account Which, for example, is the most predomi- of an exemplary Dr. Rudd, who had won nant in the following, which is quoted Queen Elizabeth's favour by his preaching. within a page or two of this charming Archbishop. Whitgift informed the doctor criticism? Music is sweetest near or that her Majesty admired his plainness of over rivers, where the echo itself is best speech so much as to destine him to the rebounded by the water. Praise for pen- reversion of Canterbury. "Surely," says siveness, thanks for tears, and blessing Fuller slily, "his Grace was too inartificial God over the waters of affliction, makes a man (though none naturally love their the most melodious music in the ears of successors whilst themselves are alive) inheaven." Although there is a sort of en- tentionally to lay a train to blow up this vious infelicity in Fuller's having fallen to archbishop designed." But so it happened. the share of so curiously constituted a Poor Dr. Rudd took the Queen at her biographer, it may serve to remind us that word, and besides recommending her in his facetiousness, as is usually the case, 1596 to number her days and incline her was probably less important in his own heart unto wisdom, he "touched on the ineyes than in those of his readers. No firmities of age, when the grinders shall theologian or historian would be pleased be few in number, and they wax dark that at the knowledge that his memory would look out at the windows;' personally ap 6 plying it to the Queen-how age had fur-served, is the great school for learning tolrowed her face, and besprinkled her hair eration. Fuller's great contemporary, with its meal." Dr. Rudd had no further Jeremy Taylor, wrote his eloquent plea opportunities of preaching about the for liberty when he was himself a sufferer, Queen's grinders, and was never again and did not quite stick to his principles mentioned as Whitgift's successor. Or when the rod was placed in his hand, intake an exquisite touch in the portrait of stead of being applied to his back. And, the "pious and painful" Mr. Perkins. therefore, we might hope that, if Fuller's This gentleman, "would pronounce the life had been prolonged further into the word damn with such an emphasis as left a good times of the Restoration, his mind doleful echo in his auditors' ears a good would have recovered its tone, and his dewhile after; and when catechist of Christ's ficiency in party-spirit have proved to be College, in expounding the ten command-nothing more than a temporary expedient. ments, applied them so home as almost to And yet, to say the truth, the apology make his hearers' hearts fall down and would scarcely bear inspection. Hatred, hairs to stand upright." Painful Mr. if we may judge from the whole tenor of Perkins, as we are glad to hear, became his writings, was a quality left out of his milder in his old age, and probably lost composition. Moderation is his favourite his skill in pronouncing the word damn. virtue from first to last. His pet proverb, had not the passion which makes a man rush into martyrdom, and erred, if he erred at all, rather on the side of too great pliancy. A queer expedient for stuffing his Church History with dedications is alleged as a proof of subserviency; and his portrait of the King, in the Holy and Profane State, is said to be a specimen of fulsome flattery. Yet we would rather compare his exuberant dedications to the grand performance which closes a display of fireworks- -a sort of supererogatory exhibition of the resources of his marvellous ingenuity. And if Charles I. is drawn more glowingly than the customs of the time sanctioned (rather a doubtful point), it should be added in fairness that the same eulogy was published in a subsequent edition, when his idol was almost approaching the steps of the scaffold. Fuller, in fact, was a consistent, not a hot-headed royalist; and the very worst that could fairly be said against him is that he possessed enough of the wisdom of the serpent to keep his head above water in troublous times. And, even then, we must attribute such immunity as he enjoyed to the fact that he was, by an exception to ordinary laws, a man who excited warm attachments, even though he felt no warm aversions. There is not, it may be said, much ven-repeated in many passages of his works, is om in this satire; and, in fact, it would be that you should not split the board by difficult to distil from Fuller's whole works driving in a nail violently, without first enough to supply a single good slashing" wimbling" a hole for its reception. He article of the modern type, to say nothing of the furious invectives of his own time. His only considerable controversy ended by his reconciliation to his antagonist, a result due chiefly to Fuller's good temper and candour. He would, to express it in a word, have loved Charles Lamb, and been disgusted by Swift. There is something childlike about the gentleness of his temper, as, to say the truth, there is something occasionally childish in his jokes. He apparently doubted whether Jews should be exiled, or heretics - unless, indeed, their heresies concern those "points of religion which are awfully to be believed," should be put to death. He could scarcely be unfair to a Puritan, or even to a Papist; a fact which, considering the uncompromising times in which he lived, should, perhaps, lead us to condemn him as a bad hater. Some exculpation might, perhaps, be attempted by a determined whitewasher even on that head. We may charitably hope that he had a greater stock of ill-feeling than he cared to express. Once, he tells us, he publicly prayed, soon after the King's death, that the nation might be settled on its "true foundation;" and had some difficulty in interpreting this ambiguous phrase to the satisfaction of a then powerful hearer. "When men come with nets in their ears," For one reason or another Fuller has he says, "it is good for the preacher to become a kind of privileged pet amongst have neither fish nor fowl in his tongue," those traders in literary curiosities whose and he exults in the safe avowal that his favourite hunting-ground is amongst the manner was really that which had been great writers of the seventeenth century. suspected. A certain degree of judicious He is the spoilt child of criticism whose reticence is observable in the Worthies and most audacious revolts against the respectthe Church History. Persecution, it is ob-able laws of taste have an irresistible - claim. Some of their eulogies rather tax prompted innocent fun rather than bitterour credulity. Coleridge almost ventures ness. The pugnacious element indeed was the assertion that, next to Shakspeare, developed to infinitely greater excess in Fuller, beyond all other writers, "excites Smith, and the Edinburgh Reviewer, ifimin him the sense and emotion of the mar-mersed in the civil wars, would hardly vellous the degree in which any given have lived out his days without some close faculty, or combination of faculties, is pos- acquaintance with the gaol and the pillory. sessed and manifested so far surpassing Not to pursue the parallel too far, it what one would have thought possible in may, perhaps, be safely said that, if Fuller a single mind, as to give one's admiration and Sydney Smith could have exchanged the flavour and quality of wonder." A centuries, each would have adopted some recent writer, labouring to give some no- of the most striking peculiarities of the tion of Fuller's extraordinary fertility of other's manner. Of the two, we should illustration, declares that, in this respect, say that Fuller was the most felicitously Burke and Jeremy Taylor are his only ri- placed. The age in which he lived was vals. The comparison, even when nar- prepared to fool him to the top of his bent; rowed to this point, requires so many instead of cramping his energies by literqualifications before it can be made to ary proprieties, it fairly threw the reins on hold water that we need not consider its his neck, and left him to plunge and rear merits. Such analogies, to say the truth, and throw up his heels as he pleased. Inare at best a dangerous game. Fuller is deed, it stimulated rather than permitted too obstinately original to allow us to find his freaks of fancy. A man with so much any tolerably homogeneous writer against quicksilver in his blood would have been whom he could be fairly measured. If, comic even if placed in a modern pulpit, however, we were driven to discover some and swathed in sevenfold respectability. parallel, it would be better to seek in But at that day no whim, however preposrather lower regions; the wit which de- terous, no quibble, however childish, no tects innumerable points of unsuspected allusion, however far-fetched, was forresemblance at contrast throughout earth | bidden to him. Wide, indeed, as was the and heaven seems to differ in essence, as licence granted to him, he succeeded well as in degree, from the splendid im- in astonishing his contemporaries. His aginations which lay all knowledge under antagonist Heylin reproaches him for contribution. The peculiarity of Fuller's the merry tales and scraps of trenchillustrations is, that the two things com- er-jests," which would be fitter as pared are as unlike as possible, whilst a supplement to the Hundred Merry precisely the reverse is true of the great- Tales than as part of a Church history. est imaginative writers. Their metaphors Fuller is scandalized at this charge, and cast light into dark places; Fuller's, as a declares that, if his accuser will produce general rule, strike out a brilliant spark, "the most light and ludicrous story in all which only flashes upon you a deceitful the book, he will match it with equal levigleam of resemblance. With all due love ties in the gravest authors extant." of Fuller, it is easier to detect a humbler Though Fuller might have been hard put resemblance with our modern clerical hu- to it to maintain his challenge, his apparmourist Sydney Smith. Their writings, ent unconsciousness of impropriety is charindeed, are as different as the tastes of their acteristic. The most ordinary form of periods. But, if we imagine the worthy Fuller's wit is a singular compromise becanon transported to the seventeenth cen- tween jest and earnest. One reader might tury, and encouraged to give the reins to regard as said in all seriousness what his comic fancy, we imagine that he could would strike another as outrageously grohave rivalled his great predecessor. His tesque. One cannot but suspect that Fulpopular sayings have something of the ler sometimes said good things with genFuller flavour. The proposal to take off uine unconsciousness of their wit, and even his flesh and sit in his bones is a good spec- that some of his good things have become imen of the extravagant conceit; and, for good since his death. The explanation is a shrewd quibble, Fuller would have de- simple. The quaintness of Fuller and lighted in the recommendation to the Al- some of his contemporaries is a peculiar dermen to lay their heads in order to make literary species, which may be described a wooden pavement. The wit was in both as a hybrid between pedantry and wit. cases planted in a sound substratum of The secret of much of his facetiousness is sound common sense, and in both cases that he forces the formal phraseology of united with a healthy temperament which the expiring school to play strange antics prevented it from turning sour, and for the amusement of the new. Some 66 328 66 times he uses it with so grave a face that, means mine-thine, because the town had we almost take him for a genuine pedant, two founders; "malignant" may be deand sometimes with so broad a grin that rived either from "malis ignis," bad fire, he almost sinks to buffoonery. Something or "malum-lignum," bad wood; bonfire, of the same thing may be observed at the however, a word which he can seldom present day. A youth fresh from the uni- mention without a pun, is not, in his opinversities will, at times, ornament his con-ion, derived from bone-fire, as carrying a versation with strange metaphors derived reference to the "burning of martyrs, first from his studies. Such a youth, for ex- fashionable in England in the reign of ample, has been heard to describe heaven King Henry IV." It was held in those as a sphere in which the holiness varies in- days that any two words which could be In versely as the radius. Take him serious- tortured into any resemblance of sound ly, and he is a pedant, or, in modern lan- and meaning were necessarily related. Credit him with a percep- other words, etymology was simply punguage, a prig. tion of his own absurdity, and we have one ning; and Fuller differs only from the of the quaint formulæ in which Fuller's genuine pedant in so far as he evidently soul delighted. The secret here is the use rejoices in proportion to the utterly outof technical language in a totally inappro- rageous nature of the suggestion. Punning, however, is, in this sense, more general priate sphere, and in one shape or another Fuller performs infinite variations upon merely one branch of a this trick. Here, for example, is a freak method. There are puns, if one may say of language adapted for the atmosphere of so, in substance as well as in words; and the schools. David, he says, formed a these strange derivations of words bear to practical syllogism, of which the major was modern philology the same relation that a lion, the minor was a bear, and the prac- such allegories as Bacon expounded in his tical conclusion that he could kill Goliah. book on the wisdom of the ancients bear The true scholar, he tell us, is provided to the new science of comparative mytholwith all manner of offensive and defensive ogy. Any meaning which can be twisted syllogisms, long swords; out of words or out of ancient legends, weapons, as enthymemes, short daggers; dilemmas, when put on the rack of a boundless ingentwo-edged swords that cut on both sides; uity, is assumed to be the explanation of sorites, chain-shot; and for the defensive, their origin. Take any text in the Bible, distinctions, which are shields; retrac- for example, without the slightest regard tions, which are targets with a pike in the to its history or its position, and assume midst of them, both to defend and oppose." that it is not only true, but that any infersymbolical A pleasure, which we find it hard to under-ence drawn from it, or any stand, was taken in flourishing all the in- meaning that can be fitted to it is equally Wonderful certain, and you have a boundless field for struments in this armoury. were the word-tournaments in which our ingenuity. Every sermon and treatise of ancestors delighted. Fuller tells us of the those days teems with ingenious applicacharming entertainment provided for tions which may remind us of the celebraQueen Elizabeth on her last visit to Ox-ted argument of the "angelical doctor" ford. It was disputed, "whether it be lawful to dissemble in matters of religion?" One of the opponents, he says, "endeavoured to prove the affirmative by his own example, who then did what was lawful, and yet he dissembled in speaking against the truth - the Queen being well pleased at the wittiness of the argument.' It is quite in harmony with this vein of wittiness when Fuller fills pages with such quibbles as this: "Malice is angry with him (the good judge) because she cannot Or, again, Fuller's be angry with him." outrageous puns are not unfrequently puns of pure wantonness mere purposeless freaks of language; but they pass by imperceptible degrees into serious philologieal ," he says, statements. Templum," gravely, "quasi tectum amplum, a large covered space;" Minden, he declares, 66 who deduced the necessity of implicit faith 66 |