Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/256

236 is one of the happiest and most amusing collections of the kind. Whatever Fuller wrote,—history, as the Church History of Britain (1655-56); sermons and reflections, as Good Thoughts in Bad Times (1645) or Mixed Reflections in Better Times (1660); or local description and history, as in the England's Worthies (1662),—his genial humour, nimble wit, clear arrangement, and short pithy sentences make his work eminently readable, if never profound. He had the wit's quick eye for superficial resemblances, without either the poet's or the man of science's deeper sense of identity in difference.

In philosophy, history, and biography, three names—Hobbes, Clarendon, and Walton—stand with Bacon's pre-eminent in the century, and a word or two on each must close this sketch of a period filled with writers not easy to classify.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was one of the acutest and most independent minds that the agitations of the century turned to political speculation. At Oxford he distasted the schoolmen, but formed no distinct design of pursuing any new line in speculation and inquiry. His first visit to the Continent with his pupil and patron, Lord William Cavendish, sent him back to his neglected classical studies, to acquire a useful