certain preacher, whom he much commends for extracting all manner of fruitful lessons from this rather unpromising text: "Am not I thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day?" "How fruitful," he exclaims, "are the seeming barren places of Scripture!" or, indeed, of any other work, if only you are permitted to deduce from it any conclusion which the most fertile imagination can hang on to it by means of the most arbitrary associations. The peculiarity, then, of Fuller, is not that he makes far-fetched quotations, or that his logical gambols are of the most unaccountable nature. So far he is merely adopting a recognized method in which half the preachers and writers of his time might be his rivals. His merit is that his most fantastic caprices are always witty. Nothing is more wearisome than this in cessant straining of the invention in the hands of an essentially dull writer; the jokes of such a man are always missing fire. Fuller's instinct is infallible; he touches his queer fancies so lightly that you are never disgusted; if for a moment he seems to be serious, he is instantly off upon some outrageous conceit which would extort laughter from a bishop at a funeral. The same love of strange conceits was equally prevalent amongst the poets whom Dr. Johnson chose to call the metaphysical school, probably because the doctor held with what justice need not be inquired that metaphysics is merely a name for verbal juggling. In poetry the effect is simply vexatious. The warmest admirers of George Herbert - who is now probably the best known poet of the school-have been profoundly annoyed when he descends from his loftier strain to the wretched quibbles which mar it so cruelly when he devotes a poem to a wretched, if not profane, pun about "I ease you," and crams into fourteen lines more than a score of quaint similitudes for prayer, each more far-fetched than its predecessor; or when he spoils a fine stanza by its last two lines after this fashion: For us the winds do blow, pot of ointment. Or take one of Cowley's often-quoted absurdities. "I saw," he says in the Davideis — I saw him fling the stone as if he meant This, as a bit of serious eloquence, is hopelessly absurd; but it is one of Fuller's pet jokes, and his variations are always amusing; as where he speaks of Aphek, whose walls falling down, gave both death and gravestones to 27,000 of Benhadad's soldiers;" or, to quote a rather similar grotesque, observes of the amiable habit of Elizabethan sailors, who threw negroes into the sea, "the murder is not so soon drowned as the men." The good captain, he adds, "counts the image of God as nevertheless his image cut in ebony as if done in ivory." 66 excellent jokes in prose. It is worth reConceits, so irritating in poetry, may be marking that Fuller's first performance was what he called a poem; its title being David's heinous sin, hearty repentance, heavy punishment." It has recently been reprinted by one of his admirers, who, however, is fain to confess that it is not of much poetical merit. In fact, Fuller, had he confined himself to that mode of expression, would have been as frigid and as dull as the now unreadable Cowley. One specimen will perhaps prove it sufficiently. This is David's pathetic lamentation for Absalom: My son, whose body had of grace the fill! In this case, the necessity of rhyming has quenched not only his poetry but his wit; but even where his wit breaks out it seems to have all the fun taken out of it. To do complete justice, it must be added that Fuller, who could be so prosaic in verse, often rises to the poetical in prose. Every now and then, his quaint comparisons reveal deep feeling or genuine thought as well as a mere faculty for detecting odd The earth doth rest, heaven move and waters resemblances, though even his finest pas flow; Nothing we see but means our good As our delight or as our measure; In Fuller's lively prose, the quaintness would be an additional charm: in Herbert's solemn devotion it is the fly in the sages have some touch of the grotesque about them. Such an instance, for example, may be found in Fuller's approximation to the often-quoted lines of Waller The soul's dark cottage battered and decayed, Lets in new light through chinks which time has made. "Drawing near her death," says Fuller of spontaneous outburst of a nature of irreof St. Monica, "she sent most pious pressible buoyancy and childlike frivolity thoughts to heaven, and her soul saw a of amusement. Whatever emotion is exglimpse of happiness through the chinks cited in his breast, it seems to stir him to of her sickness-broken body." It may be the same outward expression: any fuel remarked, by the way, that Fuller appar-will support his flame; if in a merry mood, ently deserves the credit of another fine conceit of the same poet. He quotes Waller in his Worthies in the form -- We know no more what they do do above, he jests to express, and if solemn, he jests, as we must suppose to hide them. Answering an assailant, in a passage full of real feeling, he indulges himself with this outrageous pun. "As for other stains and spots in my soul, I hope (be it spoken without the least verbal reflection) that He who is the Fuller's soap (Malachi iii. 2) will scour them forth with His merit." It is amusing to see Fuller's compunction The second line, as written by Waller (in the poem on the death of Lady Rich), runs, "that they happy are and that they love." Fuller's version is improved by the additional fancy. We may quote one other constraining him to call attention to his parallel, which has sometimes been noticed, as a proof of Fuller's power of mixing the absurd with the elevated. Speaking of graves, he tells a story of an Englishman dying in Spain and suffering from the attempts of the priests for his conversion. "Their last argument was, 'If you will not turn Roman Catholic, then your body shall be unburied.' Then,' answered he, 'I will stink;' and so turned his head and died." Directly after which amazing retort, he adds this fine sentence. "A good memory is the best monument. Others are subject to casualty and time; and we know that the Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders." In this, though strikingly said, there is still a certain flavour of quaintness. In Sir Thomas Browne's hands, the quaintness is absorbed in the poetry. Time sadly overcometh all things, and is now dominant and sitteth upon a sphinx, and looketh unto Memphis and old Thebes, whilst his sister, Oblivion, reclineth on a pyramid gloriously triumphing and turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh beneath her cloud. The traveller, as he paceth amazedly through these deserts, asketh of her, 'Who builded the Pyramids?' and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not." 66 It is comparatively rare, however, for Fuller to rise to the borders of that lofty region of eloquence where Sir Thomas Browne treads like a native. In fact, he is little given to soaring, and distinctly prefers the earth to the clouds; his wisdom is such as comes from excellent good sense, without any great profundity of thought; his piety is that of a cheerful and admirably expressive person who has never sounded the depths of despair or risen to ecstatic rapture; and his wit owes its charm to its being obviously the pun by disavowing it. On the same prin- In his reflections Fuller tells us of an ape which carried a child to the top of a house, much to the horror of the family watching from below, till the ape, tired out with his tricks, laid the child gently back in the cradle. In Fuller's allegory, the child represents true religion, and the ape the wild fanaticism of his time. We might allegorize the same story by putting Fuller's wit for the ape, and his genuine kindliness for the child. We, the lookers-on, are always trembling; but this wit never changes playfulness for spite. - gregation at Blackfriars in 1623. The sermon, he says, "began to incline to the middle, the day to the end thereof, when, on a sudden, the floor fell down whereon they were assembled. It gave no charitable warning groan beforehand, but cracked, brake, and fell, all in an instant. Many were killed, more bruised, all frighted. Sad sight to behold, the flesh and blood of different persons mingled together, and the brains of one on the head of another! One lacked a leg, another an arm; a third nothing but breath, stifled in the ruins." Impute not this comic vein, The same unmistakable peculiarities run as Fuller would put it, to want of kind- through all Fuller's writings. Each page liness, or even want of sympathy with as it were, bears his signature. They may Roman Catholics, irresistibly ludicrous as be divided roughly into the antiquarian the circumstances appeared to him, and and the didactic. The Church History and tempting as was the coincidence suggested the Worthies - his chief performances in by the occurrence of the accident on the the first department are interesting (for 5th of November. Fuller cites the Tower our present purpose) chiefly as displaying of Siloam, and says that the death of these the art in which Charles Lamb declares sufferers was "the object of pity" (though him to be unrivalled-that of telling a also, it would seem, of no little amusement) story. His "eager liveliness, and the perto all wise and good persons; and, indeed petual running comment of the narrator, to pause for one moment in my remarks happily blended with the narration," are -I could find it in my heart to commend doubtless delightful. Perhaps it should Fuller's style to the attentive considera- be added that the anecdote must be a tion of those masters of descriptive lan- short one. Adopting Gray's comparison guage in whose mouths a man is always of a grand poetical style to the flight of an an individual and fire a devouring element. eagle, we must compare Fuller's to the pretHow much more lively would have been ty though rapid flight of some small bird. the descriptions of the burning of Chicago, Or-for quaint illustrations are surely or the fighting in Paris, if our sense of lawful in such a case- he reminds us of propriety were a little less exacting! that amiable creature, the ratel, in the The narratives, treated in Fuller's style, Zoological Gardens, who, with untiring would have bristled with Scriptural quota- regularity, used to take half-a-dozen lively tions for the most part utterly inappro- steps at a round trot and then throw a priate and with puns, good only by rea- somersault. Fuller cuts up his so-called son of their inconceivable badness. Strange history into short anecdotes, and in each parallels and contrasts would have been of them generally springs two or three drawn between the fate of Chicago and of jokes upon us, which explode as unexpectSodom and Gomorrah; and the sieges of edly as a cracker in a drawing-room. For Paris and Jerusalem would prove to have example, he gives a short notice of an had unsuspected points of resemblance. English pope, Adrian IV., in the Worthies. Even the fate of the sufferers would have He gets through it with the seriousness of afforded matter for quibbling, if not for a steady-going antiquarian — excepting of downright fun. The difficulty of choosing course a pun or two-till he reaches the between roasting and boiling would have poor pope's death. Then we have this suggested absurd comments in the case of genuine bit of humour. Adrian "held his Chicago, and the terrors of Paris would place four years, eight months, and twenhave been carefully paralleled with the ty-eight days, and Anno 1158, as he was Massacre of the Innocents. Alas! we have drinking, was choaked with a fly, which lost the naïveté which excuses such eccen- in the large territory of St. Peter's patrimony tricities; we cannot laugh without being had no place but his throat to get into. But cynical; and, though I have seen very since a fly stopped his breath, fear shall amiable people fairly upset in private by stop my breath, not to make uncharitable the comic aspect of a murder or a bad ac- conclusions from such casualities." The cident, it is perfectly clear that no living Worthies remind us of a pithy biographiwriter could convince us of the warmth of cal dictionary, where some humourist has his sympathies at the very time that he illustrated every article by a quaint cariwas playing the queerest of literary pranks. cature; when to these anecdotes we add his queer collection of proverbs, his odd description of the various counties, and the miscellaneous bits of information that crop up at intervals, the Worthies is perhaps one of his most amusing books. ornament. "A single life," he says, "doth well with churchmen; for charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool." Bacon's sententious gravity raises a common-place to the rank of a grand philosophical axiom; Fuller's discursive fancy invests it with all the air of a startling paradox. One or two more parallels may be taken from other essays. gageth their affections to the greater loyalty." This last sentence reads like a clumsy paraphrase of Bacon's aphorism; the metaphor, though rather odd, is perhaps less strained than most of Fuller's. As, however, our space is limited, and But he soon makes amends. We are not, Fuller's quaintnesses are more inexhaust-he says, to expect too much from matriible than our coal-mines, the remainder of mouy; and this text is embroidered as this article shall be devoted to one further follows:- "Marriage is not like the hill illustration of his peculiarities. Amusing Olympus-dλos aμрos—wholly clear, as is Fuller's narrative style, he seems to without clouds; you expect both wind and me to be still better in his didactic hu- storms sometimes, which, when blown mour. He is great at a sententious moral over, the air is the clearer and wholesomer aphorism; and comments on the aphorism, for it. Make account of certain cares and ludicrous or serious, really illustrative or troubles which will attend thee. Rememutterly irrelevant, fairly jostle each other ber the nightingales, which sing only some in their haste for expression. In his most months in spring, but commonly are silent popular book, the Holy and Profane State, when they have hatched their eggs, as if brief essays and descriptions of typical their mirth were turned into care for their characters are mixed up with biographies | young ones." The illustration is pretty intended to exemplify the didactic matter. and fanciful, and he gives us half-a-dozen Wit and wisdom, shrewd observation, and more in the next page. Bacon only inkindly feeling are spread through its pages dulges in one metaphor, but that is one in profusion. Perhaps the best measure which is an argument instead of a mere of its merits may be obtained by comparing it with the performance of another great master of English, though in a different style. Some of Bacon's essays deal with the same topics, and the contrast is instructive. Fuller, for example, and Bacon have both something to say upon the well-worn topic of marriage. As marriage has been discussed by innumerable sages and satirists, from the days of Sol- Praise," says Bacon, "is the reflection omon to those of the Saturday Review, we of virtue, but it is as the glass or body cannot expect any positively new lights which gives the reflection." "Fame," says from our authors. There is, however, no Fuller, "is the echo of actions, resounding better test of high literary skill than the them to the world, save that the echo repower of making the proposition that two peats only the last part, but fame relates and two make four sound like a new and all, and often more than all." The mirror startling truth. Both writers succeed in distorting the image of the object is, as far giving interest to a subject where the only as it goes, a perfect comparison; an echo choice appears to lie between truisms and repeating more than has been said has a paradoxes, but by curiously different de- tinge of Irish absurdity. Bacon again vices. More than one of Bacon's weighty tells us, in his concentrated style, that in sentences have passed into proverbз. "He many human affairs, "it often falls out that that hath a wife and children hath given something is produced out of nothing; for hostages unto fortune," "Wives are young lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and men's mistresses, the companions of mid- opinion brings on substance." Fuller, afdle age, and old men's nurses." Bacon's ter remarking that fame "sometimes hath sentences are heavy with thought, as created something out of nothing," finds though compressed in a kind of intellectual his instance, not in military or civil affairs, hydraulic machine. Like Lord Thurlow, but in the pygmies, giants, and amazons they look wiser than any sentence ever with which fame has peopled countries really was. Now, take Fuller's treatment that never existed-"especially near the of a thought identical with one of Bacon's: poles; " and he compares it to a "kind of "Though bachelors be the strongest mushroom, which Pliny reports to be the stakes," he says, "married men are the greatest miracle in nature, because growbest binders in the hedge of the common- ing and having no root; and then goes wealth." "... Married men, especially to explain how it comes to pass that fame if having posterity, are the deeper sharers first "creeps through a village, then goes in that state wherein they live, which en-through a town, then runs through a city, " then flies through a country, still the fur-, humoured country clergyman, who expects ther the faster. Yea, Christ, who made the everybody to be as good and happy as dumb speak, made not tell-tale fame si- himself. In fact, when we endeavour to lent, though charging those he cured to hold their peace." This, it seems, is to be accounted for, amongst other causes, by the "ministration of spirits. The devils are well at leisure to play such pranks, and may do it in a frolick. And yet they would scarce be the carriers except they were well paid for the portage." sum up Fuller's character, that is, perhaps, the last impression that remains with us. His simplicity is certainly not unmingled with a certain shrewdness, of which the following remark, as appropriate to the present day, may be a sufficient instance: Charity mistaken, which relieves idle people, like a dead corpse, only feeds the vermin it breeds;" but we feel certain that if Fuller met an idle beggar after writing that sentence, he relieved him with the most utter disregard of sound economical doctrines. Some such case was in his mind when in his Good Thoughts he ponders over the problem whether he is responsible for the crimes that were committed by a villain whom he had saved from starvation on the promise of reform, and who, as usual, forgot his promise. Fuller's remorse for a good-natured action was not, we may be sure, very deep. In fact, we may doubt whether he ever could know what melancholy meant. When his Bacon tells us that "to seek to extinguish anger utterly is but a bravery of the Stoics; " and Fuller, that " He that wants anger hath a maimed mind, and with Jacob sinew shrunk in the hollow of the thigh, must needs halt." Bacon goes on to give some excellent, if rather worldly, advice as that "Men should carry anger rather with scorn than with fear, so that they may seem rather to be above the injury than below it;" whilst Fuller sets out on that speculation with which Lamb was so intensely delighted, and observes gravely, that though we must obey the apostle's words, "Let not the sun go down on your wrath,' to carry to the an-party was on the road to ruin, he wrote tipodes in another world of our revengeful nature"-yet we must not be too literal; for "then might our wrath lengthen with the days; and men in Greenland, whose | day lasts above a quarter of the year, have plentiful scope of revenge." One more remark may conclude the comparison. In Bacon's essays there is always that sub-acid flavour natural to a man who has had harsh experience and looked at the seamy side of things as well as their surface. Fuller always shows the almost provoking optimism engendered by an easy and prosperous life, whilst even his subsequent trials never seem to have soured him. Both writers, for example, remark that the king "is a mortal god:' but Bacon characteristically adds, "of all kinds of men God is the least beholden unto them; for he doth most for them, and they do ordinarily least for him." Both are eloquent on the advantage of combining justice and mercy. Fuller, after some characteristic remarks, concludes that "in his mercy our king (that is, the ideal king) desires to resemble the God of heaven, who measureth his judgments by the ordinary cubit, but his kindnesses by the cubit of the sanctury-twice as big." Bacon, on the other hand, observes, "that the restraint of justice towards sin doth more retard the affection of love than the extent of mercy doth inflame it." Bacon speaks of kings and criminals like a shrewd lawyer and statesman; Fuller like a good Good Thoughts in Bad Times; when it was ruined, he wrote Good Thoughts in Worse Times; and when it was rising from the ground, Mixed Contemplations in Better Times. And the remarkable circumstance is that all his thoughts are as cheerful as anybody else would have in the best of times. No misfortune could damp his spirits or diminish his intense affection for a pun. He was the most buoyant of mankind; and if he ever knew what it was to be melancholy, he could find relief in lamentations so lively as to sound like an effusion of exuberant spirits. The wonder is that we feel this boyish exhilaration to be significant of true feeling. Some men shed tears when they are deeply moved; Fuller pours forth a string of quibbles. It is a singular idiosyncrasy which inverts the conventional modes of expressing devotion, and makes jokes, good, bad, and indifferent, do duty for sighs. But nobody should read Fuller who cannot more or less understand the frame of mind to which such fantastic freaks are congenial; and those who do will learn that, if in one sense he is the most childlike, in another he is amongst the most manly of writers. He enjoys a sort of rude intellectual health, which enables him to relish childish amusements to the end of his days; and it is difficult to imagine a more enviable accomplishment, though it must be admitted that it leads to some rather startling literary phenomena. |