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 and fellows of Corpus Christi College to the curacy of St. Benet's, Cambridge. Within a twelvemonth after—namely, in 1631—HE made his first appearance as an author. His Davia's Heinous Sin, Hearty Repentance, Heavy Punishment, which came out in that year, was his sole adventure of noteworthy compass as a versifier; and he certainly testified his discretion in choosing thenceforward to be satisfied with writing prose. A valuable prebend attached to the Salisbury Cathedral was bestowed on him at this time, near about which he is supposed to have delivered, in discourses, his so-called Comment on Ruth. Next we hear of him as rector of Broadwindsor, where, probably, he composed his History of the Holy War, published in 1639. His Holy State was given to the world in 1642. Having just before this removed to London under circumstances which are involved in some obscurity, he was there appointed lecturer to the Inns of Court and to the Savoy Chapel. But trouble awaited him, as it then awaited all other loyalists whom it had not overtaken already, and 1643 found him a refugee at Oxford. There he was warmly welcomed by the king and his adherents, but on his imprudently daring to urge lenient counsels, his moderation gave as much dissatisfaction to the court party as it had previously given to the Parliamentarians, and he fell into temporary disgrace. Nevertheless, he suffered, at the hands of the anti-royalists, the same spoliation which would have been visited on a malignant of the extremest stamp. To fill up the measure of his misfortune—as if it were not enough that he should be deprived of his stated means of livelihood—he was despoiled of his library. For a while, also, his loyalty was held, though without the slightest grounds, in considerable suspicion. On coming to be better known, however, he was restored to favor, and was enrolled among the royal chaplains. If the doubts as to the sincerity of his adhesion to Charles were ever actually thought to have good foundation, they must have been dissipated by his voluntarily exposing himself to danger, as he did at one of the sieges of Basing House. Like Isaac Barrow, he would at need have done duty militant just as effectually with carnal weapons as with spiritual. No longer required at Basing House, he repaired to Oxford again, and then to Exeter, where he was nominated chaplain to the princess Henrietta Anne. But he held his new post for only a short period. Leaving Exeter, he once more sought Oxford, and thence went to London. Forbidden to preach there, he retired to Northamptonshire, and then reappeared at the metropolis, where he was sojourning in the memorable year 1649. Becoming in that year curate of Waltham Abbey, he enjoyed an interval of quietude while all around him was turbulence. Yet he was soon in London afresh, lecturer at various churches from 1651 till near the end of his life. In 1658 he was appointed rector of St. Dunstan's, Cranford, but we read of him as subsequently journeying to The Hague and to Salisbury, and as preaching at the Savoy Chapel. It must have solaced his latter days to reflect that he had survived to welcome the Restoration. He died, from what is reasonably surmised to have been typhus fever, on the 16th of August, 1661, and lies buried in the chancel of the church to which he last ministered, at Cranford, Surrey.
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.
From Fuller we pass to Fuller's new biographer, the only biographer he has hitherto had that at all deserves the appellation. A completer life-history than that which Mr. Bailey has produced is of rare occurrence in English literature. There was no motive for his keeping back anything that is known of Fuller; and he has really enabled us to form wellnigh as distinct an idea of the portly and cheery old divine as if we had known him in the flesh. Faithful to rigid justice while reproducing the warmly eulogistic judgments which have been passed on Fuller, especially in this century, he has given us a circumstantial account of the censures which were denounced on him by microscopic and malevolent criticasters and Dryasdusts among his contemporaries. Some of the censures referred to were grounded on the multitudinous dedications in which Fuller indulged; and, in truth, it strikes one as rather singular to find, as in his Church History, not only every book, but every section of a book, prefaced by a long string of compliments addressed to a separate dedicatee. But these dedications meant money, and Fuller was poor. Furthermore, if in his necessity he flattered, his flattery was, for the most part, of a kind not irreconcilable with due self-respect on the part of the flatterer. It is a very different thing from the nauseous adulation to which Dryden—to name but one out of numerous kindred offenders—consented to abase himself. As auxiliary to a full understanding of Fuller in his social relations, his dedications are now of prime value. Though many of them are inscribed to persons else quite unknown to fame, with a good number of them it is otherwise; and they serve, by the information which they embody, to show that Fuller was on terms of familiar intimacy with a whole host of notabilities in Church and State. Of these personages, and so of many others with whom Fuller associated, Mr. Bailey, heedful of the adage noscitur a sociis, has compiled very satisfactory sketches, derived in all cases from the most trustworthy authorities. In addition to a Life of Fuller, he has thus gone far to give us a sort of biographical dictionary of the leading men, political and ecclesiastical, who rallied round the unfortunate First Charles, and who used their most strenuous diligence to save his desperate cause from shipwreck.
One who has already made acquaintance with Fuller's writings must feel animated, under the guidance of the new light now thrown upon them, to renew that acquaintance; and he to whom the wise and witty old worthy is as yet a stranger must, unless obdurately insensible, be moved to a suspicion that he ought to remain a stranger no longer. To Mr. Bailey we are beholden alike for a biography of the first excellence, and for a sterling contribution to the history of an era which possesses undying interest for every Englishman, be he conservative, liberal or republican; and for every intelligent American as well. We are given to understand that the author has now in contemplation the publishing of Fuller's sermons, of which there has never been a collective edition, and of which several are among the rarest books in our language. The design is one which challenges the furtherance of every lover of good literature; and the Life, which, in parting, we emphatically commend to our readers, should avail to secure for it the encouragement it unquestionably merits.
The Greville Memoirs: A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV. and King William IV. By Charles C.F. Greville. Bric-à-Brac Series. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.
The distillation from Mr. Greville's copious memoirs which Mr. R.H. Stoddard has made for his interesting series is perhaps quite enough of a good but not very noble thing. Our gossip-loving part is not the proudest part of our nature, and Mr. Greville has but two crowned kings of gossip to celebrate, so far. It is amusing enough to see the disgusted clerk of council coming out of the audience in a fret, and hear him saying, as he does in good set terms, that the Fourth George is a spoiled, selfish, odious beast. What must inevitably strike the republican mind is that, after all, this sceptered beast was allowed to govern the country and defend the faith through a long, peaceful and stupid reign, and that his company was, on the whole, thought preferable to his room by a free people. As for the next monarch, William, never was there such a Roi Carotte, and Offenbach seems to have been born to immortalize him in one of his peculiar versions of history. He was not exactly a king in a pantomime, for he talked incessantly, but he was such a vulgar, malapert, meddling, fatuous squireen of a king that etiquette lost its raison d'être in his presence, and government ministers and foreign ambassadors laughed almost openly at his folly—all except Talleyrand, who sat with composed face through his dinner-speeches, and said softly that they were "bien remarquable." We cannot but think, however, that in this delineation of two nursery-rhyme kings the artist has put a bit of himself. If Mr. Greville had been really in the current of the social and political questions of the day, which included some wonderful reforms, instead of the born bureaucrat that he obviously was, he would perhaps have got a little more rational human nature into his portraits, or at least have given more importance to their background and surroundings. He writes himself down very clearly as a watcher of scandals and lover of backstairs history; a man of elegance and gentlemanly instincts in a rather small way; a person very easily shocked at social maladdress; a reading man intensely fond of literary company; and a racing man who periodically laments that he cannot cure himself of his love of the turf. Amiable, frank, and of that graceful mental bearing that bespeaks good blood rather than good marrow, he is keen but superficial in what he notices, and tries his tooth constantly on the really great figures of the day, Brougham and Wellington, who are objects of his dislike. It is harsh to say so, but, in fact, Mr. Greville completes a triad with his pair of vicious and narrow monarchs as he sails down the same stream, snarlingly protesting, but quite unconscious of the currents that are modifying the age. At present, as we know, nous avons changé tout cela. British Virtue in person is on the throne, and she disarms satire by handing her memoirs in person for revision to the Greville of the day, who happens to be Sir Arthur Helps; and this secretary is no turfman, never in his voluminous writings betraying the least acquaintance with a horse; but he is what is a great deal better, a sort of burgher Lord Bacon, a philosopher replete with the wisdom of the nineteenth century, and able to give it out in genial chapters for the use of schools. From Greville to Helps—both attached to one single monarchy—we see what a step has been made, and how short a time now-a-days will change types completely: Greville, padded, full of deportment, devoted to the great, with simple faith in the institutions of family, and criticising royalty with that petulant ease of a valet which, in its way, is adhesion and adoration; and Helps, a pamphleteer in six easy lessons, a pedagogue in guise of an essayist, a man in the current of all our reforms—above all, the meek editor of the queen's diaries.
Books Received.
The Bhagavad Gitá. Translated from the Sanskrit by J. Cockburn Thompson. Chicago: Religio—Philosophical Publishing House. S.S. Jones.
A Practical and Critical Grammar of the English Language. By Noble Butler. Louisville, Ky.: J.P. Morton & Co.
The Puddleford Papers; or, Humors of the West. By H.H. Riley. Boston: Lee & Shepard.
Critical and Historical Essays. Contributed by Lord Macaulay. New York: Albert Mason.
For Better or Worse. By Jennie Cunningham Croley. Boston: Lee & Shepard.
Three Essays on Religion. By John Stuart Mill. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
The Babes in the Wood. By James De Mille. Boston: W.F. Gill & Co.
School of Singing. By F.W. Root. Chicago: George F. Root & Sons.
Treasure-Trove. Central Falls, R.I.: E.L. Freeman & Co.
Our Helen. By Sophie May. Boston; Lee & Shepard.