to London, where, though he did not recover his
benefices, he was leniently treated, and even, in 1655, obtained license to
preach. Nevertheless, the Restoration would probably have brought him
promotion, but he lived not long enough to receive it, dying on the 15th of
August 1661. He was an extremely industrious writer, publishing, besides
the work already mentioned, and not a few minor pieces (_The Holy and
Profane State_, _Thoughts and Contemplations in Good, Worse, and Better
Times_, _A Pisgah-sight of Palestine_), an extensive _Church History of
Britain_, and, after his death, what is perhaps his masterpiece, _The
Worthies of England_, an extraordinary miscellany, quartering the ground by
counties, filling, in the compactest edition, two mighty quartos, and
containing perhaps the greatest account of miscellaneous fact to be found
anywhere out of an encyclopedia, conveyed in a style the quaintest and most
lively to be found anywhere out of the choicest essayists of the language.

A man of genius who adored Fuller, and who owes to him more than to any one
else except Sir Thomas Browne, has done, in small compass, a service to his
memory which is not easily to be paralleled. Lamb's specimens from Fuller,
most of which are only two or three lines long, and none a pageful, for
once contradict the axiom quoted above as to a brick and a house. So
perfectly has the genius of selector and author coincided, that not having
myself gone through the verification of them, I should hardly be surprised
to find that Lamb had used his faculty of invention. Yet this would not
matter, for they are perfectly Fullerian. Although Fuller has justly been
praised for his method, and although he never seems to have suffered his
fancy to run away with him to the extent of forgetting or wilfully
misrepresenting a fact, the conceits, which are the chief characteristic of
his style, are comparatively independent of the subject. Coleridge has
asserted that "Wit was the stuff and substance of his intellect," an
assertion which (with all the respect due to Coleridge) would have been
better phrased in some such way as this,--that nearly the whole force of
his intellect concentrated itself upon the witty presentation of things. He
is illimitably figurative, and though his figures seldom or never fail to
carry illumination of the subject with them, their peculiar character is
sufficiently indicated by the fact that they can almost always be separated
fr