tham Abbey, he
enjoyed an interval of quietude while all around him was turbulence.
Yet he was soon in London afresh, lecturer at various churches from
1651 till near the end of his life. In 1658 he was appointed rector of
St. Dunstan's, Cranford, but we read of him as subsequently journeying
to The Hague and to Salisbury, and as preaching at the Savoy Chapel.
It must have solaced his latter days to reflect that he had survived
to welcome the Restoration. He died, from what is reasonably surmised
to have been typhus fever, on the 16th of August, 1661, and lies
buried in the chancel of the church to which he last ministered, at
Cranford, Surrey.

Considering the unsettled and wandering life which Fuller led for many
years, it may seem almost a marvel that in those very years he should
have accomplished such laborious--nay, all but gigantic--enterprises
as are to be referred to them; for it was then that he composed his
voluminous _Pisgah-sight of Palestine, Church History_ and _Worthies_,
not to speak of many minor writings. But the secret of his
prolificness amidst surroundings which would have paralyzed most men
into stark sterility admits of ready elucidation. Besides being
endowed with great physical vigor and enjoying uninterrupted health.
Fuller never wasted a moment, was an unweariable student at odd hours,
and moreover supplemented the advantage of a matchless memory by the
strictest observance of method. Taken for all in all, he was without
question one of the most remarkable of Englishmen--not of his own age
merely, but of all bygone ages. "Next to Shakespeare," says Coleridge,
"I am not certain whether Thomas Fuller, beyond all other writers,
does not excite in me the sense and emotion of the marvelous....
Fuller was incomparably the most sensible, the least prejudiced, great
man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men." Others among his
countrymen have been more learned, and others have surpassed him in
this or that special faculty, but the whole that we have in him it
would be hard to find a parallel to. Culeridge emphasizes the equity
of his judgment; and this point is one regarding which there can be no
diversity of opinion. As to his wit, granting that its quality may
here and there be somewhat inferior, still, it has probably never been
surpassed in quantity by any one man. It has the laudable character,
too, of being nearly always impersonal, and while it amuses it almost
in equal measure instruct