W.W.C.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

    The Life of Thomas Fuller, D.D., with Notices of his Books,
    his Kinsmen and his Friends.  By John Eglinton Bailey.  London: 
    Pickering.

By no means to the credit of the nineteenth century, it is hardly prudent, as yet, to speak to the general public about Thomas Fuller without formally introducing him.  Coleridge and Southey and Lamb were, to be sure, familiar with his writings, and prized them extremely.  But they did the same by the writings of many another old worthy now undeservedly slighted; and, for all their eulogies on him, the great bulk of readers were still content to continue in ignorance of the treasures he has bequeathed to us.  The neglect of him which at present prevails is, however, in large measure, a delinquency of long standing.  His chief work is undoubtedly his Church History; and Heylin’s elaborate impugnment of its accuracy appears to have had great weight, as with Fuller’s contemporaries, so with the generation which immediately followed, and onward almost to our own time.  To Heylin succeeded Bishop Nicolson in exerting himself to discredit that valuable work, and it is only within a few years that its character has been substantially rehabilitated.  Together with the reputation of Fuller as an historian, his reputation in other respects for a long while underwent eclipse; for, as it is reviving again, we may not say that it passed away.  His matter quite apart—­and it is always interesting—­and abstractedly from his pervasive pleasantry, which is always original, it is a wonder that he is not more esteemed than he is in an age which professes to set store by style.  Mr. John Nichols, an editor of his Worthies, timidly hazarded the observation that, as against the strictures of Bishop Nicolson, there might be much said in “vindication of the language of Dr. Fuller”—­a comment which excited Coleridge to a high pitch of exasperation.  “Fuller’s language!” he ejaculates.  “Grant me patience, Heaven!  A tithe of his beauties would be sold cheap for a whole library of our classical writers, from Addison to Johnson and Junius inclusive.  And Bishop Nicolson!—­a painstaking old charwoman of the Antiquarian and Rubbish Concern!  The venerable rust and dust of the whole firm are not worth an ounce of Fuller’s earth.”

Of Fuller’s ancestry nothing is known, on the paternal side, beyond his father, a college-bred clergyman, who died in 1632.  His mother was a Davenant, of an ancient and respectable family.  Fuller was born in June, 1608, at Aldwinkle, in Northamptonshire, at his father’s rectory.  When only about twelve years of age he was entered at Queen’s College, Cambridge, his progress in his studies having been such as to authorize this unusually early transfer from school to the university.  In 1628 he exchanged Queen’s College for Sydney-Sussex College, and in the following year he was presented by the master