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 instructs.  Had Fuller, with his mental agility and his mastery of incisive diction, been poisoned with the bile of Swift, it is terrible to think what a repertory of biting sarcasms and envenomed repartees he might have transmitted for the study and imitation of cynics and sneerers.  Bitterer enemies no man ever had to contend against; and unenviable indeed must have been their disappointment at finding themselves wholly impotent to discompose his sage and large-hearted serenity.  So impressive, withal, is his spirit of toleration and benevolence that a diligent reader of his pages is, as it were, perforce imbued by it.  Indeed, we know of few writers whom we can point to with more confidence as calculated, in antidote to the fret and chafe inseparable from existence in our day, to induce a tone of repose and resignation in ourselves, and a disposition to take charity as our watchword in our dealings with others.