Excerpt from An Essay on the Life and Genius of Thomas Fuller: With Selections From His Writings But though in Fuller, as in all writers, many passages are not susceptible of transplantation, it is, for the reasons already given, more easy to detach them from Fuller than from most. His most striking Essays are but a series of insulated thoughts, epigrammatically expressed 5 often of great beauty, but often marred by others little worthy to keep them company. In many cases, it is but to weed, and the flowers, so far from being injured, are seen to greater ad vantage and bloom in greater beauty than before. Whether, in some cases, I may not have spared a weed and grubbed up a flower, will of course admit of doubts with many, because taste and association in such matters so widely differ. All I ask of critics is, first, that they will be pleased to examine what is exscinded in any particular place, and compare it with what is retained, before pronouncing judgment; secondly, that they will recollect that it is impossible to please all palates and, thirdly, that they may well believe that I have left out much that I myself should have liked to put in, when I say that the passages I had marked for extraction are at least twice as numerous as those which can be compressed into this little volume. The great difficulty has been in selection. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.