Fuller. In his _Worthies of England_ he is mainly concerned with the
facts of a man's life, and though, in his own word, he fleshes the
bare skeleton of time, place, and person with pleasant passages,
and interlaces many delightful stories by way of illustrations, and
everywhere holds us by the quaint turns of his fertile fancy, yet the
scheme of the book did not involve the depicting of character, nor did
it allow him to deal with many contemporaries whom he had known. In
the present volume it has therefore been found best to represent him
by the studies of Bacon and Laud in his _Church-History_. Bacon he
must have described largely from hearsay, but what he says of Laud is
an admirable specimen of his manner, and leaves us wishing that he had
devoted himself in larger measure to the worthies of his own time.

There are no characters in Aubrey's _Brief Lives_, which are only a
series of rough jottings by a prince of gossips, who collected what
he could and put it all on paper 'tumultuarily'. But the extracts from
what he says of Hobbes and Milton may be considered as notes for a
character, details that awaited a greater artist than Aubrey was to
work them into a picture; and if Hobbes and Milton are to be given a
place, as somehow or other they must be, in a collection of the kind
that this volume offers, there is no option but to be content with
such notes, for there is no set character of either of them. The value
of the facts which Aubrey has preserved is shown by the use made of
them by all subsequent biographers, and notably by Anthony à Wood,
whose _Athenæ Oxonienses_ is our first great biographical dictionary.

Lives of English men of letters begin in the seventeenth century,
and from Rawley's _Life of Bacon_, Sprat's _Life of Cowley_, and the
anonymous _Life of Fuller_ it is possible to extract passages which
are in effect characters. But Walton's _Lives_, the best of all