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.
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