TERBURY. (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.

After the Revolution, Atterbury, though bred in the doctrines of
non-resistance and passive obedience, readily swore fealty to the
new government. In no long time he took holy orders. He occasionally
preached in London with an eloquence which raised his reputation, and
soon had the honour of being appointed one of the royal chaplains.
But he ordinarily resided at Oxford, where he took an active part
in academical business, directed the classical studies of the
undergraduates of his college, and was the chief adviser and ass