akespeare and his
brotherhood rests upon the pages of this divine. In Fuller the
world-spirit of the Elizabethan dramatists becomes urbanity, the
mellow humor of the dweller in the town. Too well satisfied with the
kindly comforts of life to agonize over humanity and the eternal
problems of existence, Fuller, although a Church of England clergyman,
was no less a cavalier at heart than the most jaunty follower of King
Charles. He had not the intensity of nature which characterizes the
theologian by the grace of God. His 'Holy and Profane State,' his
'Good Thoughts in Bad Times,' and 'Good Thoughts in Worse Times,'
evidence a comfortable and reasonable reliance on the Unseen; but they
will not be read for their spiritual insight so much as for their
well-seasoned and delightful English. That quaint and fragrant style
of his lends charm even to those passages in which his thought is
commonplace.

It is in Thomas Fuller the historian and biographer, that posterity
recognizes a man of marked intellectual power. His scholarship is
exhibited in such a work as the 'Church History of Britain'; his
peculiar faculty for happy description in the 'Worthies of England.'
Fuller was fitted by temperament and training to be a recorder of his
own country and countrymen. His life was spent upon his island; his
love was fastened upon its places and its people. Born the same year
as Milton, 1608, the son of a clergyman of the same name as his own,
he was from boyhood both a scholar and an observer of men and things.
His education at Cambridge fostered his love of books.

His subsequent incumbency of various comfortable livings afforded him
opportunities for close acquaintance with the English world of his
day, and especially with its "gentry." By birth, education, and
inclination, Fuller was an aristocrat. During the civil war he took
the side of King Charles, to whose stately life and mournful death he
has devoted the last volume of his great work, the 'History of the
Church of Britain.' Under the Protectorate, the genial priest and man
of the world found himself in an alien atmosphere. Like many others in
Anglican orders, he was "silenced" by the sour Puritan authorities,
but was permitted to preach again in London by the grace of Cromwell.
He was subsequently appointed chaplain to Charles II., but did not
live long after the Restoration, dying of a fever in 1661.

An early instance of modern scholarship is found in the histories
writ