One of the pleasantest of old English humorists is Thomas Fuller, who was a chaplain in the royal army during the civil war, and wrote, among other things, a Church History of Britain; a book of religious meditations, Good Thoughts in Bad Times; and a “character” book, The Holy and Profane State. His most important work, the Worthies of England, was published in 1662, the year after his death.  This was a description of every English county; its natural commodities, manufactures, wonders, proverbs, etc., with brief biographies of its memorable persons.  Fuller had a well-stored memory, sound piety, and excellent common sense.  Wit was his leading intellectual trait, and the quaintness which he shared with his contemporaries appears in his writings in a fondness for puns, droll turns of expression and bits of eccentric suggestion.  His prose, unlike Browne’s, Milton’s, and Jeremy Taylor’s, is brief, simple, and pithy.  His dry vein of humor was imitated by the American Cotton Mather, in his Magnolia, and by many of the English and New England divines of the 17th century.

Jeremy Taylor was also a chaplain in the king’s army, was several times imprisoned for his opinions, and was afterward made, by Charles II., bishop of Down and Connor.  He is a devotional rather than a theological writer, and his Holy Living and Holy Dying are religious classics.  Taylor, like Sidney was a “warbler of poetic prose.”  He has been called the prose Spenser, and his English has the opulence, the gentle elaboration, the “linked sweetness long drawn out” of the poet of the Faerie Queene.  In fullness and resonance Taylor’s diction resembles that of the great orators, though it lacks their nervous energy.  His pathos is exquisitely tender, and his numerous similes have Spenser’s pictorial amplitude.  Some of them have become commonplaces for admiration, notably his description of the flight of the skylark, and the sentence in which he compares the gradual awakening of the human faculties to the sunrise, which “first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills.”  Perhaps the most impressive single passage of Taylor’s is the opening chapter in Holy Dying.  From the midst of the sickening paraphernalia of death which he there accumulates rises that delicate image of the fading rose, one of the most perfect things in its wording in all our prose literature.  “But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was as fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb’s fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head and broke its stock; and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces.”