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Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 3 by Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay
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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
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