New Biographies of Illustrious Men Author:Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FRANCIS ATTERBURY. Francis Atterbury, a man who holds a conspicuous place in the political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of England, was born in the y... more »ear 1662, at Middleton, in Buckinghamshire, a parish of which his father was rector. Francis was educated at Westminster School and carried thence to Christ Church 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, 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 Ahithopel 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 and 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 thrownon 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 vigor of those parts which are rhetorical and aggressive. The Papists were so much galled by the sarcasms and invectives of the young pole...« less