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CHAPTER XIII.

SCENES OF THOMAS FULLER'S BOYHOOD AND YOUTH.

"We but begin to live from that fine point

Which memory dwells on with the morning star,

The earliest note we heard the cuckoo sing,

Or the first daisy that we ever plucked,

When thoughts themselves were stars, and birds, and flowers,
Pure brilliance, simplest music, wild perfume,
Thenceforward mark the metamorphoses!"

T was noon; and the bright warm autumn sunlight was full upon that little upland village. How still it was! It seemed as if everything was most deeply hushed that I might enjoy an hour's quiet communion with the past.

Passing centuries had wrought many changes upon human life; and many generations of village folk had been gathered to their fathers, leaving their dust to await the resurrection under the shadow of the walls which had echoed to their prayers; but after all, Aldwinkle St. Peter's looked as placid as if human changes could never disturb her peace, and as fresh in her antique simplicity as if time had held her features exempt from alteration or decay. There was the old stony "street," the picturesque cottage gables, with their creepers overhanging the little crowded flower-beds; and the churchyard pathways through the grassy hillocks. All might be thought the same as when the rector's son, a boy not yet in his teens, used to be seen tripping across the valley on his way to Achurch, or rambling towards Liveden, the "old manor house in a wood," to look at the religious emblems, devices, and inscriptions with which the architectural taste of Sir Thomas Tresham had distinguished the ill-fated heritage of his son-that Francis Tresham whose murderous enterprise in the Gunpowder Plot was defeated by means of his own letter to Lord Monteagle, his brother-in-law; or when the

young scholar, with a well-set figure, thoughtful face, and graceful, curly hair, might be observed abstractedly pacing to and fro, unconsciously devouring a penny loaf as a preparation for the duties of the dinner-table.

It was pleasant to look around and think that young Fuller's eye had often looked upon Aldwinkle houses, distributed and clustered just as they were now, and upon the same fields, the same garden plots, the same turns of the road, and the same peeps over the country of "spires and squires." The rectory in which he was born and bred was indeed gone, that quaint old house with its speaking tapestry, its cozy corners, and its old English fireside nooks. Not a stone was left to tell where for four years that boy of "pregnant wit" used to get his lessons ready for Arthur Smith, his reverend private schoolmaster; or where he was wont to sit thoughtfully listening to the learned talk of his venerable father and his saintly uncle, Davenant, Bishop of Salisbury, now and then "putting in," as it was said, "observations beyond expectation or his years."

Knowing, as many do, what Fuller became, and sharing in the joy of those who have studied the instructive evidence of his uncle's goodness and intellectual power, one could scarcely help wishing to see the dwelling and the very room where that youthful face, so full already of various thought, cheerful gravity, and ripening humour, used to be turned inquiringly upon the grand front and majestic countenance of the great spiritual lord who, in thought and feeling and temper, so deeply sympathised with the Epistle to the Colossians. But not one crumbling relic was there to help me in trying to realise this scene in Fuller's school-boy life.

Nevertheless, the church was yet standing in which his mind first opened to Divine truth under the ministry of his own father. The key was at my service, and ere long I was in the parish sanctuary alone-alone as to "things which are seen," but not without companionship with the unseen. The church wore the appearance of irreverent neglect. It wanted evidence of decent attention to appearances. It lacked that air of comfort, that kind of sacred charm, which seems to

invite the people to prayer. Those who built it had given it the grace of consistent form. Though not large, it had a nave with clerestory lights, a north and south aisle, a spacious chancel with well-decorated windows; but the walls and

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arches were now made alternately white and yellow, the chancel was bare and unfurnished, except with a few rude benches for children, and a dirty fire-place, which looked as if it were thought better for the scene of communion to be warm to the feeling than clean to the sight. An ugly singinggallery was stuck up upon two posts of timber; and it seemed to me, as I looked from the unsightly thing to the arches of the nave, that the rude whitewashed faces on the old corbels were expressing a painful sense of the impropriety. One longed for some power and authority to make Aldwinkle St. Peter's more worthy of the memories which enriched its history. It surely was in better style and purer consistency when the infant Fuller was presented at its font on the 19th of June, 1608, or when he lisped his first responses at its Sunday service, or when his heart and tongue first fell into harmony with its "voices of praise and thanksgiving."

That rector's boy must often have looked upon the tomb of his grandmother Davenant, the rich merchant - tailor's wife, of Watling Street. In his day the tomb was still fresh, and the inscription clear enough to be read and pondered by the thoughtful grandson. At the time I saw it the letters were faded, for the tomb was too evidently as uncared for as the polemical theology of the good woman's honoured and devout son John, of Sarum. But there it was, sacred to the memory of

MARGARET DAVENANT,
Sometime the wife of

John Davenant
Citizen of London.
She departed this life
March 30, 1613.

Many and happy years I lived a wife,
Fruitfull in children, more in Godly life,
And many years in widdowhood I past,
Until to heaven I wedded was at last:
In wedlock, children, widdowhood ever blest,
But most in death, for now with God I rest..

One of Fuller's beautiful sentences in his lectures on the Book of Ruth would naturally occur to the mind while looking at this memorial; and perhaps he was but giving mature and finished expression to thoughts suggested to his youthful soul by his pious relative's epitaph, when he said, "The monument less subject to casualty is to imitate the virtues of

our dead friends; in other tombs the dead are preserved: in these they may be said to remain alive."

After resting awhile in the vestry, the condition of which was in keeping with that of the church, I looked into the old parish chest, and there, in companionship with some cast: away brass candelabra, was an antique ponderous pewter flagon, of more than a half-gallon measure, "The gifte of William King the Elder to the Parish of St. Peter's, Aldwinkle." It rested on a copy of King James's Bible in black letter and the first volume of "The Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the New Testament," with a record on the title-page, "This with Tome ye second belongs to ye Parish Church of St. Peter's, Aldwinkle." These old volumes had possibly been handled by the senior Fuller, the rector; and as I sat it was pleasant to indulge in dreamy thoughts of the time when the venerable man used to pass into the chancel robed for Divine Service. He was the friend of Overall and Sir Robert Cotton; and in frequent intercourse with Dr. Roger Fenton and Richard Greenham. He was revered by his son for his admiration of the Cambridge professor, William Whitaker, of whom Bishop Hall said, "Never a man saw him without reverence, or heard him without wonder." He emulated the example of Whitaker, who was pious and learned enough to hold himself free from ecclesiastical extremes; and so far succeeded as to give a tone of moderation to the character of his son, who drank in his father's temperate spirit and style of thought, and lived to give them immortal expression in his Truth Maintained or defence of his Sermon of Reformation.

"We have," says he, "the benefit of the fathers' books: a mighty advantage, if we were as careful to use it as we are ready to brag of it for our own credit. And here I must complain of many men's laziness. Indeed, a learned man (Holcot) compared such as live in the latter times in respect of the fathers to dwarfs standing on giants' shoulders. But then, if we will have profit by the fathers' learning, we must take pains to mount to the top of their shoulders. But if, like idle dwarfs, we still do but stand on the ground, our heads will not reach to their girdles. It is not enough to throw the books of the fathers together in a heap, and then, making their works our footstool, to stand on the outside and covers of them, as if it were no more but up and ride, boast

ing how far we behold beyond them. No; if we expect to get advantage by their writings, we must open their books, read, understand, compare, digest, and meditate them. And I am afraid many that least look into the fathers, boast most that they look beyond them."

The Christian temperance thus expressed and shown forth in the example of the Fullers, both father and son, was never more needed than in our own times, though, perhaps, the devout culture of it is still confined to the few. So I thought, at least, as I was on my way through the streets of Cambridge one evening, trying to realise the times when the seats of learning had to share in the miseries of open strife between king and parliament, conformity and dissent. Fuller was amidst that strife. He had left Aldwinkle when but thirteen, and spent eight years at Queen's College and eight in Sydney Sussex; and it struck me, as I sauntered through the quiet streets in the starlight, that there was a great deal to awaken thoughts of his Cambridge days and the troubles of the years that soon followed,-years of which Fuller plaintively says, in his preface to the History of Cambridge, "For the first five years during our actual civil wars I had little list or leisure to write, fearing to be made a history, and shifting daily for my safety. All that time I could not live to study who did only study to live."

I saw that many of the houses were still standing on which he must have looked as he went to and fro; but in several cases they seemed to bear yet the tokens of that antagonism which so frequently disturbed him. One of the old gablefronted dwellings was "The Castle" inn, and another was the home of a gun and pistol maker. Even the old front and gateway and tower of his own Queen's College wore a gloomy, defensive aspect, which spoke of suspicion and fear of intrusive mischief. And the strange mingling of the militant and the peaceful in the style of Sydney Sussex gables, battlements, and towers, appeared in keeping, too, with the turbulent course of things which Fuller left college to contend with. "Alas!" thought I, the same clashing principles as disturbed his peace and tested his Christian temper are still at work; and there is the same call for the cultivation of harmonised firmness and moderation and charity." It was no small refreshment to be assured, however, that the spirit of such men as Fuller continued to live