Coleridge and Lamb were responsible for putting Fuller into a critical straight-jacket by their exaggerated praise of his wit and wisdom. The nineteenth century reprinted his work in selections, often no longer than single sentences, and failed to appreciate his true contributions to biography and historiography. Walter Houghton has taken The Holy and Profane States as a test case and has shown that we can judge Fuller much more fairly as soon as we look at entire books, at their contents and their forms. His study, which is the only book of criticism about Fuller that has ever been published, looks into Fuller’s mind just before he began to write and during the time of writing and sees how it was working. The result is a unique contribution to English literary and intellectual history.