FRANCIS ATTERBURY.
(December 1853.)
Francis Atterbury, a man who holds a conspicuous place in the
political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of England, was born in the
year 1662, at Middleton in Buckinghamshire, a parish of which his father
was rector. Francis was educated at Westminster School, and carried
thence to Christchurch a stock of learning which, though really scanty, he
through life exhibited with such judicious ostentation that superficial
observers believed his attainments to be immense. At Oxford, his parts, his
taste, and his bold, contemptuous, and imperious spirit, soon made him
conspicuous. Here he published at twenty, his first work, a translation of
the noble poem of Absalom and Achitophel into Latin verse. Neither the
style nor the versification of the young scholar was that of the Augustan
age. In English composition he succeeded much better. In 1687 he
distinguished himself among many able men who wrote in defence of the
Church of England, then persecuted by James II., and calumniated by
apostates who had for lucre quitted her communion. Among these
apostates none was more active or malignant than Obadiah Walker, who
was master of University College, and who had set up there, under the
royal patronage, a press for printing tracts against the established religion.
In one of these tracts, written apparently by Walker himself, many
aspersions were thrown on Martin Luther. Atterbury undertook to defend
the great Saxon Reformer, and performed that task in a manner singularly
characteristic. Whoever examines his reply to Walker will be struck by the
contrast between the feebleness of those parts which are argumentative
and defensive, and the vigour of those parts which are rhetorical and
aggressive. The Papists were so much galled by the sarcasms and
invectives of the young polemic that they raised a cry of treason, and
accused him of having, by implication, called King James a Judas.