Reviews And Essays in English Literature

e, had some trace, was an excess of illustration, not natural and spontaneous, but far-fetched and studiously ingenious. Lyly, its prototype, exhausts the animal and vegetable kingdom to enhance a truism. Burton accumulates epithets and multiplies quotations, until it is these, and not his theme, that engage the amused and bewildered mind. Sir Thomas Browne is never happy unless he can express a thought, in itself simple, in the form of an enigma. But Fuller's wit and fancy have their race, the flavour of the soil from which they spring; they belong essentially to a character, uncommon in all ages, yet not limited to any age ; to a combination of quick imagination with a sympathetic temper, hitting upon resemblances too 1 "The Collected Sermons of Thomas Fuller." J. E. Bailey and W. E. A. Axon, Gresham Press. remote for ordinary observation, yet not too abstruse to be understood and enjoyed at once. Hence a quaintness such as Fuller's is a recurrent, not an extinct, phenomenon. A clever matron of to-day, when " flitting," found a temporary refuge, with her family, under the hospitable roof of a neighbour, and said to him on entering, " I am afraid you will say, ' Gad, a troop cometh.' " We have found this witticism twice anticipated by Fuller in the volumes before us. In South, as in Fuller, we have that happy medium of wit, which is the true salt of it, as preserving it from corruption. But South's wit is often marred by its asperity, and never more than faint...