Fuller, Nicholas

, a learned English divine and critic, was born at Southampton in 1557, and educated at the free-school in that town. He did not go directly thence to the university, but was taken into the family of the bishop of Winchester, Dr. Robert Home; where spending some time in study, he was made at length his secretary, and afterwards continued in that office by his successor, Dr. Watson. But Watson dying also in about three years, Fuller returned home, with a resolution to follow his | studies. Before he was gettled there, he was invited to be tutor to the sons of a* knight in Hampshire, whom he accompanied to St. John’s college, Oxford, in 1584. His pupils leaving him in a little time, he removed himself to Hart- hall, where he took both the degrees in arts, and then retired into the country. He afterwards took order*, and was presented to the rectory of Aldington, or Ailington, near Amesbury, in Wiltshire. He afterwards became a prebendary in the church of Salisbury*, and rector of Bisbop’s-Waltham, in Hampshire. He died in 1622. He was extremely learned in the sacred tongues, and, as Wood quaintly says, “was so happy in pitching upon useful difficulties, tending to the understanding of the Scripture, that he surpassed all the critics of his time.” His “Miscellanea Theologica,” in four books, were published first at Heidelberg, 1612, 8vo, and afterwards at Oxford, in 1616, and at London, in 1617, 4 to. These miscellanies coming into the hands of John Drusius, in Holland, he charged Fuller with plagiarism, and with taking his best notes from him without any acknowledgment. But Fuller, knowing himself guiltless, as having never seen Drusius’s works, published a vindication of himself at Leyden, in 1622, together with two more books of “Miscellanea Sacra,” Leyden and Strasburgh, 1650, 4to. All these miscellanies are printed in the 9th volume of the Critici Sacri,“and dispersed throughout Pool’s” Synopsis Griticorum.“There are some manuscript* of Fuller in the Bodleian library at Oxford, which shew his great skill in Hebrew and in philological learning; as” An Exposition of rabbi Mordecai Nathan’s Hebrew Roots, with notes upon it,“and” A Lexicon," which he intended to have published with the preceding. ¹