even the architectural history of Cambridge could, in his hands, afford scope for humour:

'Within the compass of this last year (1603), but in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, died that worthy and painful servant of Jesus Christ, Mr. William Perkins, whose life I have formerly written and therefore forbear any repetition. He was buried in his own parish church of St. Andrews in Cambridge. Only I will add, it sadded me lately to see that church wherein this saint was interred ready to fall to the ground. Jacob said of Bethel, the house of God, "How dreadful is this place!" I am sorry it may in a far different sense be said of this St. Andrews, filling such as approach to it with fear of the ruins thereof. I say no more, but as David was glad to go up into the house of the Lord, all good men may be sorrowful to behold God's ruinous house coming down to them.'

It is humour, indeed, that is the warp and woof of Fuller's writings. Scarcely a page is to be found without some quaint comparison, startling analogy, or audacious pun; while alliterations abound:

But bold beggars are the bane of the best bounty.' Prone rather to pity and pardon, than punish his passion.' 'His languishing life lasted a year longer.' 'Much bemoaned, a martial man of merit.'

His colloquial style seldom betrayed him into coarseness or vulgarity, nor are his conceits ever too elaborate to be perspicuous. His chief fault is an occasional parade of learning, but he is much less pedantic than Burton or Browne. He excels all other writers of the period in gentle and humorous kindliness, which sometimes becomes delicately beautiful. His style is more modern than that of most of his contemporaries; the sentences are short and their arrangement is admirably clear; where he digresses -as he often does to follow out some whimsical train

of thought, or tell some humorous anecdote-the digression, and the resumption of the main thread of the narrative are both distinctly marked.

Fuller, it is said, was almost the first man of letters who adopted the writing of books as a means of livelihood. In the introduction to the Worthies he quaintly sums up the aims he had in view in the exercise of his prolific pen.

Cato, that great and grave philosopher, did commonly demand, when any new project was propounded to him, Cui bono? What good would ensue in case the same was effected? Know then, I propound five ends to myself in this book: first, to gain some glory to God; secondly, to preserve the memories of the dead; thirdly, to present examples to the living; fourthly, to entertain the reader with delight; and lastly (which I am not ashamed publicly to profess), to procure some honest profit to myself.'

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Under the last head he observes that it was a proper question which plain-dealing Jacob pertinently propounded to Laban, his father-in-law; "and how shall I provide for my house also?" Hitherto no stationer hath lost by me; hereafter it will be high time for me (all things considered) to save for myself.'

Fuller was probably the most popular prose writer of his time, but in the last century his works sank into comparative neglect, until Coleridge, Lamb, and other critics called attention to their literary excellence, and vindicated for their author the high place which he now by general consent occupies among English humorists. Coleridge's well-known encomium may be cited in conclusion: Next to Shakespeare, I am not certain whether Thomas Fuller, beyond all other writers, does not excite in me the sense and emotion of the marvellous ;-the degree in which any given faculty, or combination of faculties, is possessed and manifested, so far surpassing what one would have

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thought possible in a single mind, as to give one's admiration the flavour and quality of wonder! Wit was the stuff and substance of Fuller's intellect. It was the element, the earthen base, the material which he worked in: and this very circumstance has defrauded him of his due praise for the practical wisdom of the thoughts, for the beauty and variety of the truths, into which he shaped the stuff. Fuller was incomparably the most sensible, the least prejudiced, great man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men. He is a voluminous writer; and yet, in all his numerous volumes on so many different subjects, it is scarcely too much to say, that you will hardly find a page in which some one sentence out of every three does not deserve to be quoted for itself as motto or as maxim.'

CHAPTER IX.

THEOLOGICAL WRITERS.

THE accession of Charles of I. marks an important turning point in the history of the English Church. In the comparative quiet of the immediately preceding period, Hooker and Andrews had been forging new weapons, with which the Anglican Church might meet the attacks from Rome and Geneva, to which her basis of compromise naturally exposed her. Hitherto her attitude had been defensive, and to some extent conciliatory, but under Laud, whom the death of Andrews, in 1626, brought to the front as the leader of the anti-Calvinist party, she became more aggressive and imperious. The new system aimed at coercion rather than conversion-or perhaps at coercion as the best means of conversion-and from the schools theological controversy passed to the courts; thence, when arbitrary power could no longer suppress free discussion, it passed to the street, and became articulate in pamphlets innumerable. The intense interest taken in theological questions is perhaps the most notable feature of English life in the latter years of the reign of Charles I. Something has already been said, in connection with Milton's prose works, of the pamphlet literature of the period, which absorbed the energies of learned divines like Ussher and Hall, poets like Wither, scholars like Milton and Prynne, and politicians and men of culture like Lord ¡ Falkland.

William Prynne (1600-1669).

William Prynne may be taken as a typical pamphlet writer of the time. Coming to London from Oriel College, Oxford, he was called to the Bar in due course, but practised little. In 1627 he began his career as a pamphleteer by the publication of a tract on the Perpetuity of a Regenerate Man's Estate, followed soon after by treatises against the pledging of healths and the wearing of lovelocks. In 1633, as the fruit of seven years' labour, and four years' proof-correcting, appeared his Histriomastix, where fifty-five synods, seventy-one fathers, one hundred and fifty Protestant and Roman Catholic writers, forty heathen philosophers, and many other witnesses, are summoned to give evidence of the wickedness of play-acting. A book containing more than 100,000 references would seem to deserve Hallam's description of it as more tiresome than seditious;' but 'for a supposed reference to the Queen the luckless author was pilloried, fined, mutilated, imprisoned, and expelled from Oxford and Lincoln's Inn. From his prison the undaunted Prynne, undeterred by a second experience of the pillory, carried on his pamphlet war against the ecclesiastical system of Laud, till the Long Parliament set him and his fellow-sufferers free. Then came a time of prosperity. Prynne became member of Parliament for Newport, manager of Laud's impeachment, Recorder of Bath. But his restless pamphleteering spirit broke loose again in 1649 in A Brief Memento against the claim of the House of Commons to inclusive political power, which landed the writer a second time in custody. Next year a pamphlet attack on Cromwell led to a third arrest, and the next ten years of Prynne's life were spent in opposing the Commonwealth and Protectorate governments. At the Restoration he was made Keeper of the Records-' to keep him quiet'-and after one last pamphlet against the Corporation Act, which