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Problem and Method

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SOURCE: Houghton, Walter E., Jr. “Problem and Method.” In The Formation of Thomas Fuller's ‘Holy and Profane States,’ pp. 3-16. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938.

[In the following excerpt, Houghton discusses the critical reception of Fuller's writing from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century, maintaining that his work, particularly The Holy and Profane States, has been misunderstood by critics.]

1

Among English men of letters, Thomas Fuller has perhaps a unique distinction: no author so widely known seems to have received such meager and inadequate interpretation. By a curious irony, the failure of criticism may largely be traced to the main sources of his fame—to Coleridge and Lamb. It was they who rescued Fuller from the long neglect which had set in quickly with the Restoration, when his wit was found incompatible with neo-classical taste. But they did more than that: with infectious exaggeration of his worth, they placed him in the ranks of genius. Few of Coleridge's dicta were more extraordinary, or more influential, than his famous pronouncements on Fuller:

Next to Shakespeare, I am not certain whether Thomas Fuller, beyond all other writers, does not excite in me the sense and emotion of the marvellous.


Shakespeare! Milton! Fuller! De Foe! Hogarth! As to the remaining mighty host of our great men, other countries have produced something like them—but these are uniques.


Fuller's language! … A tithe of his beauties would be sold cheap for a whole library of our classical writers, from Addison to Johnson and Junius inclusive.1

Even when read carefully in their full contexts, these estimates are but slightly qualified; and when quoted as they stand, and requoted, in prefaces and articles, they combined with Lamb's earlier remarks to give Fuller a reputation almost fabulous.2 Between 1810 and 1891, every one of his books and all of his extant sermons were reprinted, including even an edition of his worthless poetry. In fact, when we recall that the nineteenth century saw twenty-six separate publications of his books, and twenty-five anthologies of selections, wholly or partly from Fuller, together with three extensive biographies and innumerable articles, we may wonder if any seventeenth-century writer apart from Shakespeare, Milton, and Bunyan was so widely read.3 At any rate, such a record of publication makes it evident that Coleridge and Lamb correctly sensed a “climate of opinion” very responsive to central elements of Fuller's thought and style. The Victorians in particular welcomed his didacticism, so perfectly blended of Christian morality and worldly wisdom, and made homely and amusing by his “quaint” wit; they liked his buoyant optimism, his energetic gusto; they discovered in his robust charity of mind their own brand of sentimental humanitarianism. Further, the age was one largely insensitive to Fuller's limitations. His lack of intellectual subtlety and wide erudition, of mystical fervor and imaginative reach—these shortcomings were not then serious omissions. So it was that Fuller enjoyed at once the approval of common reader and literary critic.4 By 1892 Augustus Jessopp noted that not only was his name a “household word,” but that his “enthusiastic admirers have numbered among them some of the most subtle and some of the most profound of England's critics and thinkers.”5 And Edmund Gosse, in 1903, remarked that Fuller “has been one of the most fortunate of English writers, indulged, excused, and petted by criticism, so that his very faults are found charming in the eyes of his doting admirers.”6

With the turn of the century, however, came a reaction from which Fuller has never recovered. Implied in Gosse's tone (and earlier in Stephen's stronger reference to “the spoilt child of criticism,” and to eulogies which “rather tax our credulity”), it was already explicit in Jessopp's essay.7 The hostile revaluation begun there has gone unchallenged. In spite of the increasing interest of the twentieth century in the seventeenth, Fuller has been passed over. None of his books, I believe, is now in print. Since 1900 his works have appeared only five times; since the War, only twice—in both cases, selections.8 Among the few critical articles there is nothing equal in value even to the limited work of Stephen, Saintsbury, and Jessopp. Mr. Lyman's biography, the only book about Fuller to be published in fifty years, adds nothing important to Bailey's Life, frankly makes no effort to interpret Fuller's work.9 The fact is, of course, that this work no longer speaks to anyone, critic or common reader, with any real immediacy. Those qualities to which the Victorians responded—the didacticism, the optimism, the bright but superficial wit—are not to contemporary taste; and those qualities which Fuller lacks, the twentieth century has sought and found among his contemporaries. An age which has revived the more passionate and subtle writings of Donne, and the more restrained clarity of Dryden, is unlikely to find Fuller exciting.10 It would be idle, therefore, to attempt any artificial revival of the old enthusiasms. What is needed is a fresh critical and historical approach to Fuller's work which will reveal, first, the full range of his artistic achievement, and, second, his important place in the development of English biography and historiography.

Both requirements spring directly from the shortcomings of nineteenth-century criticism. When Lamb and Coleridge fixed upon wit as the key to Fuller's greatness, they isolated a single element of the artist at the expense of other elements of equal importance; and when, in drawing secondary attention to his content, they stressed his pithy wisdom, his shrewd “thoughts,” they obscured his finer achievement in history and biography. Coleridge's famous remark, crucial in the history of Fuller criticism, precisely defines the whole approach:

Wit was the stuff and substance of Fuller's intellect. It was the element, the earthen base, the material which he worked in, and this very circumstance has defrauded him of his due praise for the practical wisdom of the thoughts, for the beauty and variety of the truths, into which he shaped the stuff.11

Nothing can better expose the fatal consequence of this focus than the habit it bred of amputation. From the practice of Lamb with his Specimens and Coleridge's assurance that “you will hardly find a page [of Fuller's work] in which some one sentence out of every three does not deserve to be quoted for itself—as motto or as maxim,”12 originated the long line of selections—Wise Words and Quaint Counsels of Thomas Fuller, Marvellous Wisdom and Quaint Conceits of Thomas Fuller, and so on, down to the Clarendon Press Selections of 1928. The reading habit thus fixed upon the mind could not but react upon criticism, deepening and confirming its groove. In the preface to Rogers' selections of 1856 we find the ultimate end of this critical blind alley. “To compile such a work as the present,” he wrote, “is … only to select from a collection; to choose a certain number of detached thoughts out of a much larger number of equally detached. … There is no continuity to be dissolved—no essential unity to be destroyed”; all of which leads to the conclusion that Fuller's books are of such a “digressive, fragmentary character” as “would almost entitle them to be considered, collectively, a gigantic Ana.13 In the latter part of the century Fuller received more thoughtful attention from Saintsbury and Leslie Stephen, but both were concerned centrally—Stephen entirely—with the analysis and illustration of Coleridge's dictum.14 Saintsbury's remark in 1894 that “the locus classicus of English criticism respecting Fuller has long been, and no doubt will long be, Coleridge's marginal note, beginning ‘Wit was the stuff and substance of Fuller's intellect,’” indicates how deeply intrenched was this single approach.15 It is true that in 1911 he cautiously suggested that “nobody should think that he understands Fuller until he has read at least one … book,” and that Broadus, in 1928, thought it was not easy “to do Fuller justice in a volume of selections”; but neither critic recognized the real misunderstanding, and the real injustice, done by the exclusive emphasis upon wit with its inevitable exposition in selections.16

The way out of this impasse to an adequate view of Fuller's achievement lies in the recognition that he possessed imagination, not merely in the limited sense of seventeenth-century wit, but substantially in Coleridge's sense of that “synthetic and magical power” which “struggles to idealize and unify.”17 That, I think, is the key to the reintegration of Fuller criticism as a whole. Its application—which means the reading and study of his books as organic wholes and not as “gigantic Ana”—will at once reveal his constructive genius, and so bring within critical perspective his full strength as an artist, whether in history and biography, or in didactic literature—a strength which will then be seen to rest on far more than his wit. This essay is an attempt to initiate such a fresh approach by studying the formation of The Holy and Profane States.

2

The Holy and Profane States presents a special challenge, for its organic unity—at best, obscure—has been utterly ignored, indeed, tacitly denied. On the one hand, because its variety of didactic materials and its constant play of wit made it ideally fitted for the “selecting” taste of the nineteenth century, only four out of the eleven “editions” since 1800 have been unabridged; and there has been no complete edition since 1872.18 On the other hand, because the book is a combination of three prose forms—loosely described as biographical sketch, essay, and character—literary historians have persisted in isolating one or another of these forms, ignoring their integrated place in the book as a whole. Still further, such criticism, reinforced here by the traditional focus on Fuller's style to the neglect of his content, has been concerned almost wholly with external form, comparing and contrasting Fuller's “kind” of character or essay with his predecessors'; while the biographies have been largely overlooked. The critics would seem to have joined the publishers in a conspiracy to conceal any unity of conception and form.19

Even a cursory glance at Fuller's own remarks about his book is sufficient to show that he was molding an organic structure to project a controlling idea. In the preface we come at once upon a crucial remark: the reader is begged to construe the book “by the generall drift and main scope which is aimed at.”20 Yet no one, I think, has ever pointed out what this was, because no one has “construed” the book as a whole.21 Later, through the volume, occur periodic notes to the reader, always calling attention to the integration of structure and forms. In spite of the two title-pages, it might seem, for example, that actually The Profane State bore only superficial relation to The Holy State:22 its single book and its ten characters hardly balance the preceding four books with their thirty-eight characters; and moreover, only three “profane” types contrast directly with three “holy” ones.23 Late in the volume, however, appears this revealing note:

The Reader may easily perceive how this Book of the Profane State would swell to a great proportion, should we therein character all the kinds of vicious persons which stand in opposition to those which are good. But this pains may well be spared, seeing that rectum est index sui & obliqui; and the lustre of the good formerly described will sufficiently discover the enormity of those which are otherwise. We will therefore instance in three principall offenders, and so conclude.24

That first sentence, describing as it does a symmetrical balance which does not exist, reveals, I think, the original plan of The Profane State. The plan was conceived only to be abandoned, or, rather, modified. As Fuller came to write Book V, he must have perceived not only that this complete design would “swell to a great proportion,” but that in telling many a good character what not to be and not to do, he had already foredoomed any exact parallel study to repetition and monotony.25 The solution was a happy one: seven characters of The Profane State are “new” (that is, types which have not appeared in The Holy State), and yet so chosen as to balance, in general, a far larger number of good characters. The Traitor, for example, may easily stand against most of the political figures of Book IV; the Atheist and Heretic against the Controversial Divine (“Truths Champion to defend her against all adversaries, Atheists, Hereticks, Schismaticks”),26 as well as against Faithful Minister, Church Antiquary, Good Bishop, perhaps also Parishioner and Patron; the Harlot against Wife and Widow, Virgin and Court-Lady. In this way the artistic balance which the two title-pages and the note lay claim to was essentially preserved. Only the Witch, the Liar, and the Hypocrite seem exceptions to the dual structure of holy and profane states.

The note has a further significance which explains its position—not at the start of Book V, but near the end. One detects a tone of fatigue: Fuller seems aware that the “vicious” characters are somehow not coming off.27 For direct moral teaching he had great skill (perhaps Addison and Steele are his only superiors), but for satiric invective he had neither the angry passion of Milton nor the mordant wit of Overbury or Butler. Indeed, these qualities were incompatible with his own highest ideal of charitable tolerance, his own deliberate practice of moderation which he learned from Bacon, and from such Anglicans as Hooker and Hall, possibly also from the Rational Theologians.28 This note marks the moment when Fuller realized once for all (he never tried it again) that satire was not within his powers as an artist. He was eager to stop, and the volume was already quite long enough. As he cast about for an excuse, he remembered his original plan to follow The Holy State with “all the kinds of vicious persons which stand in opposition to those which are good,” and his original reasons for abandoning its exact fulfilment.

Other notes to the reader show the same concern with formal structure. The integration of the biographies with the characters is at once pointed out when Fuller concludes the Good Wife: “What is defective in this description shall be supplied by the pattern ensuing”—that is, in the following life of Monica.29 Similar remarks drive home the function of the lives,30 to support and enforce the abstract characters with concrete examples. The essays of Book III are not so easily explained, but at least we can be sure they do not illustrate “Fuller's fondness for digression,” nor are they inserted among the characters by way of “diversion.”31 At the end of that book Fuller wrote, on a separate page:

These Generall Rules we have placed in the middle, that the Books on both sides may equally reach to them; because all Persons therein are indifferently concerned.32

This implies that the essays were to contain instruction applicable to all men, good or bad, wherever they might be placed in public or private life—valuable alike to the Husband and the Merchant, the Good Bishop and the Tyrant. Strictly speaking, this is not quite the case. Essays on foreign travel, on expecting preferment, or on colonizing could have little concern for servants or housewives, for heretics or old witches. An earlier note indicates a more specific integration of the essays with the characters. In the middle of the final character of Book II, that of the True Gentleman, Fuller stops to remark,

As for the Hospitality, the Apparell, the Travelling, the Companie, the Recreations, the Marriage of Gentlemen, they are described in severall Chapters in the following Book,33

that is, in the book of essays. And not simply these chapters but many others, although not all, are concerned with the interests and activities of an English gentleman. Only after a study of the major sources of Book III can we understand its full conception and reconcile the conflicting implications of the two notes. But at least it is obvious that Fuller's essays are not a digression, nor were ever intended for a diverting relief from serious moral characters. They were planned to fill an integrated place in the volume as a whole.

3

Even this cursory survey, under Fuller's own guidance, enables us to recognize the carelessness—and the significance—of such a traditional account of the book as Leslie Stephen's: “Brief essays and descriptions of typical characters are mixed up with biographies intended to exemplify the didactic matter. Wit and wisdom, shrewd observation, and kindly feeling are spread through its pages in profusion.”34 No description could better sum up the critical tradition of The Holy and Profane States, and at the same time expose its fatal weakness. Stephen shows no recognition of Fuller's constructive genius, not the least intuition that the book has a unifying idea projected into a unified design.35 Clearly what is needed is a study of the “shaping imagination.” But such a study in this case is unusually complex. When we ask what exactly was Fuller's “generall drift and main scope” and why he chose this particular, intricate form for its embodiment, we can give no satisfactory answer without reaching back, however inadequately, to the initial roots of the creative process. “This worthless present was designed you,” wrote Dryden in the dedication to The Rival Ladies, “long before it was a play; when it was only a confused mass of thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark; when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished, and then either chosen or rejected by the judgment.”36 In 1639, when Fuller's fancy was at its first work,37 there lay in his mind not merely the traditions of the seventeenth-century character and essay, and of the biographical sketch (in dictionaries, histories, prefaces, funeral sermons, and the Bible), but also those of moral and social philosophy, as they had been expounded in various forms, both in general treatises and in the literature of estates, of casuistry, of Christian economy, of courtesy, and of professional guides for gentlemen. All these traditions lay ready to use, ready to exert their influence upon the form as well as the content of a book. What was needed was an act of the imagination first to seize upon “some one predominant thought,” and then to reduce “multitude into unity of effect”—a unity not merely of formal relations, but also of “tone and spirit.”38 The following pages attempt to study this process, to explain, so far as possible, the formation of Fuller's book. Once the general unifying conception is grasped, it becomes possible to explore the major traditions which lay behind it and to estimate their individual share in the evolution of both the conception itself and its formal expression; and then, finally, we are able to catch some glimpse of that central, if ultimately mysterious, process of synthesis, both in form and in tone. The result, I think, is not only a clearer historical and critical understanding of the book, but a juster perception of Fuller's artistic method and achievement.39

Notes

  1. The first quotation (dated July, 1829) is in the Literary Remains, ed. H. N. Coleridge (1836-39), II, 389; the second and third quotations are from Notes, Theological, Political, and Miscellaneous, ed. Derwent Coleridge (1853), p. 101.

  2. Lamb's Specimens from the Writings of Fuller, the Church Historian first appeared in The Reflector, IV (1811), and were reprinted in The Works of Charles Lamb (1818), II, 72-87.

  3. J. E. Bailey, The Life of Thomas Fuller, D. D., with Notices of His Books, His Kinsmen, and His Friends (1874), bibliography, pp. 713-758; and “A Bibliography of Thomas Fuller,” ed. Strickland Gibson, in The Proceedings and Papers of the Oxford Bibliographical Society, IV (1934), pt. i (2), 145-147. These figures include only books in which Fuller's name occurs on the title-page: his work also appeared in various collections of characters, proverbs, and so on.

  4. The chief indices to the taste described are James Crossley, review of The Holy and Profane States in The Retrospective Review, III (1821), 50-71; Henry Rogers, An Essay on the Life and Genius of Thomas Fuller, with Selections from his Writings (1856)—originally published in The Edinburgh Review, LXXIV (1841-42), 328-358; J. E. Bailey, “The Life and Wit of Thomas Fuller,” a lecture delivered in 1863, reprinted in The Collected Sermons of Thomas Fuller, ed. J. E. Bailey and W. E. A. Axon (1891), I, xv-xxxii; and Leslie Stephen, “Thomas Fuller,” The Cornhill Magazine, XXV (1872), 28-44. One paragraph of Stephen's (p. 39) manages to indicate, though without much personal approval, the chief elements in Fuller's appeal to the average Victorian: “It is comparatively rare … for Fuller to rise to the borders of that lofty region of eloquence where Sir Thomas Browne treads like a native. In fact, he is little given to soaring, and distinctly prefers the earth to the clouds; his wisdom is such as comes from excellent good sense, without any great profundity of thought; his piety is that of a cheerful and admirably expressive person who has never sounded the depths of despair or risen to ecstatic rapture; and his wit owes its charm to its being obviously the spontaneous outburst of a nature of irrepressible buoyancy …”

    For the sentimentalizing of Fuller's spirit of rational toleration, note Lamb's special praise of the conceit about negroes (“images of God cut in ebony”) in The Essays of Elia, “Imperfect Sympathies”; and, also, the fatuous remarks—one in the Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (1886), II, 337, “dear, fine, silly old angel”; and the other in Coleridge's Literary Remains, II, 390: “God bless thee, dear old man! may I meet thee!—which is tantamount to—may I go to heaven!”

  5. Wise Words and Quaint Counsels of Thomas Fuller (1892), introduction, p. xxxi.

  6. Jeremy Taylor (1903), p. 216.

  7. Stephen, The Cornhill Magazine, XXV (1872), 33. Saintsbury in 1898 (A Short History of English Literature [1900], pp. 442-443) also noticed the decline of Fuller's inflated reputation.

  8. Gibson, A Bibliography of Fuller, pp. 102, 147.

  9. Dean B. Lyman, Jr., The Great Tom Fuller (1935). Theodore Spencer's review (The Saturday Review of Literature [January 18, 1936], p. 18) is severe but essentially just.

  10. The juxtaposition of Theodore Spencer's reference to Fuller in 1936 as a “figure whom our age has largely forgotten” (preceding note) with Jessopp's evidence in 1892 about Fuller's name being a household word (above, p. 5) is striking evidence of a radical shift in taste.

  11. Literary Remains, II, 389-390. See also II, 381, and Lamb, Works, II, 72.

  12. Literary Remains, II, 390.

  13. Henry Rogers, An Essay on the Life and Genius of Thomas Fuller (1856), p. iv. Bailey in his Life of Fuller, p. xxvi, n. 1, quoted this remark with approval.

  14. Stephen's work appeared in The Cornhill Magazine, XXV (1872), 28-44, and in the Dictionary of National Biography, article on Fuller, published in 1889. For Saintsbury's notices, see the next two footnotes.

  15. From the introductory note on Fuller in Henry Craik, English Prose: Selections … Vol. II. Sixteenth Century to the Restoration (1920 ed.), p. 374.

  16. Saintsbury's remark is in The Cambridge History of English Literature, VII (1911), 249-250; E. K. Broadus' in his Thomas Fuller: Selections (1928), p. xiii. It is significant that (1) Saintsbury's argument for a complete reading of one book was merely that thereby the full function of the wit might better be studied; and (2) Broadus published still another volume of selections.

  17. Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (1907), II, 12; I, 202.

  18. Gibson, A Bibliography of Fuller, p. 102. Speaking of Lamb's Specimens, Bailey wrote in 1874 (The Life of Fuller, p. xxiii, n. 1): “The citations, as is the case with most of such collections of extracts from Fuller, are mainly from The Holy and Profane State.” Maximilian Walten of the City College of New York is now engaged upon a new edition.

  19. The long list of critics I have in mind is given below, p. 17, n. 2, and p. 18, n. 3.

  20. Sig. A2v. That Fuller is here merely trying to forestall criticism of certain political passages too Royalist for the London public of 1642 does not affect the significant admission that he had in mind a single unifying conception.

  21. The only statement I know on the subject of the book as a whole is the bare remark of Edmund Gosse and R. Garnett (English Literature, An Illustrated Record [1903], III, 49) that it is “a treatise on the conduct of the Christian life.”

  22. The volume consists of: The Holy State in four books—Book I, family characters (the Good Wife, the Good Husband, and so on); Book II, professional, business, and manual characters (the Good Advocate, the Good Physician); Book III, general essays (“Of Hospitality,” “Of Jesting”); Book IV, governing characters (the Favorite, the Wise Statesman). The Holy State is followed by The Profane State in a single book (Book V in the whole volume) containing “bad” characters (the Harlot, the Witch). There are thirty-two short lives placed after twenty-six of the characters in Books I, II, IV, and V.

  23. Viz.—the Tyrant, the Common Barretor, and the Degenerous Gentleman balancing the King, the Good Advocate, and the True Gentleman.

  24. Page 410. The references are always to the first edition: The Holy State. By Thomas Fuller, B. D. and Prebendarie of Sarum (Cambridge, 1642). On p. 355 appears a second title-page: The Profane State. By Thomas Fuller, B. D. and Prebendarie of Sarum (Cambridge, 1642).

  25. For the insertion of these “do nots” in The Holy State, see below, p. 60; and notice how in one case (the Good Child) Fuller has actually introduced the “profane” child: at the end of maxim 7 (p. 16), he says, “As for disobedient children …,” and maxim 8 is typical of The Profane State.

  26. Page 60.

  27. Cf. Jessopp, Wise Words and Quaint Counsels of Thomas Fuller, p. xiv: “The last book, on the Profane State, is very inferior to the other four, and consists of a very miscellaneous collection of unpleasant biographies and scarcely less disagreeable introductory essays.”

  28. See below, p. 201, and Fuller's own essay “Of Moderation” in The Holy State, pp. 205-208, where the first sentence (the “text,” so to speak) is quoted from, and the essay as a whole based upon, Joseph Hall's Christian Moderation.

  29. Page 3.

  30. For example, those on pp. 27, 76, 300. Two of the sketches are not strictly biographies, the Rigid Donatists (illustrating the Heretic) and the Pazzians' Conspiracy (illustrating the Traitor).

  31. Bailey, The Life of Fuller, p. 221, and the same writer's essay on Fuller prefixed to the Sermons, I, xxi.

  32. Page 235.

  33. Page 150.

  34. The Cornhill Magazine, XXV (1872), 41.

  35. In similar notices of the book, the essays are not even mentioned—e.g., H. J. C. Grierson, The First Half of the Seventeenth Century (1906), pp. 235-236; Saintsbury, The Cambridge History of English Literature, VII (1911), 248; Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature, English translation (1929 ed.), p. 553. And Geoffrey Keynes (see below, p. 17, n. 2) has called the whole volume a character book.

  36. Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (1900), I, 1.

  37. This date cannot, of course, be proved. He may have planned the book long before, but at least the actual writing of it almost certainly occurred between 1639 and 1641. In the first few years after 1634, when he went to Broadwindsor, his pastoral and preaching duties could hardly have allowed him time to write more than one book—viz., The Historie of the Holy Warre, published in 1639, dedication dated March 6, 1638/39. Since he speaks in the preface to the States of being in the middle of the work “when I discovered the tempest” (surely a reference to the events of 1640), we may safely date the start of composition, and quite possibly the full conception, in 1639, shortly after he had finished The Holy Warre. That he completed the book in 1641 is established definitely by (1) the date of publication, 1642, (2) Fuller's own statement in the preface that he had sent the book to the press “a twelvemoneth agoe,” and (3), his quotation (p. 291) from Milton's Of Reformation in England, which was not published until May, 1641.

  38. Biographia Literaria, II, 14, 12. I use Coleridge's term in its more limited sense. Fuller did not have imagination in the full sense of the word in Coleridge's mind—namely, an intuitive power of penetrating behind phenomena to the One or the Truth. The limitations of his imagination are discussed below, pp. 224-225, 239-241.

  39. Such a study carries one beyond the surface exploration of specific and definite sources; indeed, in the usual sense of the word, this essay is not a “source study,” and I make no attempt to track down Fuller's extensive verbal borrowing from hundreds of books. I am interested rather in how his mind was working as he planned and wrote the book, which means that I emphasize (1) what primary influences in his own life and the life around him may have led him to make use of certain kinds of books; and (2) how these books suggested the general form and structure, the choice of specific topics, and the position of each in the volume as a whole. Why Fuller wrote about commercial ethics, why he formulated them in a character of a merchant, and why the Merchant stands in Book II before the Yeoman—these are the questions I try to answer, rather than what were his particular sources.

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