SOURCE: Wroth, Lawrence C. “Thomas Fuller and His ‘Worthies.’” The South Atlantic Quarterly 11 (January-October 1912): 215-23.

In the following essay, Wroth contends that Fuller's works remain interesting to early twentieth-century readers because they are full of gossip about his contemporaries.

Human experience has never given hearty approval to the theory that conversation should be of things and not of people, for it has found that the practice of gossiping is a decidedly pleasant way of spending the hours of recreation, and that it is an unimproved agent for mental sanitation. He is generally a churl who rejoices not in the recital of personalities, in the exposition of those trivial characteristics of his neighbor which mark him an individual and seal his brotherhood with the rest of them that standin the following of Adam.

One has said that it would be profitable to investigate the appearance in the same literary...