inveterate hatred and malice which some persons bore to the ingenious Bishop of Rochester, unless it was that, infatuated like the wild Americans, they fondly hoped to inherit not only the spoils, but even the abilities of the man they should destroy. -BATHURST, LORD, 1723, State Trials.

His behaviour in every station in life has shown him to be a person of the greatest wit, built upon the foundation of good sense and directed by the strictest rules of religion and morality. He was always for maintaining the dignity and privileges of the several offices he bore in the Church, and the just way of behaviour enforced by that steadiness which was natural to him, created him many enemies among the Canons of Christ Church and Prebendaries of Westminster, who naturally must, by their own interest, be obliged to oppose any dean who should maintain the undoubted rights which he ought to enjoy; but it is hoped all those feuds will be at an end in this last-mentioned chapter, by the prudent and just choice his Majesty has made of Dr. Bradford to succeed him. His [Atterbury's] piety towards his children, and his sincerity to his friends, made him justly beloved and respected by both. No other crime can be laid to his charge but that

for which he now suffers, which overbalances all his virtues.-WHARTON, DUKE OF? 1723, True Briton, No. VIII.

His temper was made up of irascible qualities, and had very little in it of the mild and merciful. His resentment of injuries was quick and lasting, his remembrance of favours done him soon gone. There are few or none of his friends and

patrons but what at one time or other he quarrelled with.-STACKHOUSE, THOMAS, 1727, Memoirs of the Life of Atterbury,p. 63. Hail, happy Sire! the pain of life is o'er, Stranger and wandering pilgrim no more, At home, at rest, secure in blissful skies, Where envy drops its snakes, and Fraud its guise.

See seraph guards the starry crown prepare!
See smiling angels fly to greet thee there!

When pyramids, unfaithful to their trust,
Crumble to atoms with their founder's dust;
When solid marble mould'ring, wastes away,
And desert lies the monumental clay;
Thou shalt live, to deathless Fame consign'd,
Live like the best and bravest of mankind!

Atterbury was of a restless aspiring temper, and eager to obtain the highest honours of the church, which he would certainly have acquired, had not queen Anne died. If we may judge

from the inflexibility of his character, there is reason to believe that he rejected all offers of promotion, and was never inclined to desert his party.-COXE, WILLIAM, 1798, Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole, vol. I, p. 168.

A man distinguished for his learning and his wit, and obnoxious only by his religious bigotry and false ambition. -MACKINTOSH, WALLACE, AND BELL, 1840, History of England, vol. x, p. 120.

Worthy of high appreciation must be the man who was warmly loved by Pope, revered by Wesley, admired by Steele, and honoured by Swift; who was the centre of the brilliant social circle that included Busby, Dryden, Addison, Prior, cliffe, Parnell, Rowe, Dr. William King, Congreve, Gay, Arbuthnot, Garth, RadDean Aldrich, Lords Orrery and Stanhope, Drs. John and Robert Freind, Locke, Newton, Bentley, the able critic, and Bingham, the learned divine. Nor was he less an object of regard to the rival interests struggling for pre-eminence at court,

represented by Marlborough, Shaftesbury, Sunderland, Godolphin, Halifax, Somers, Landsdowne, Dorset, Harcourt, Bathurst, Bolingbroke, Oxford, Buckingham, Walpole, Carteret, Townshend, and Pulteney -not forgetting the fair candidates for power, the Duchesses of Marlborough, Buckingham, and Queensberry, and Lady Masham. In his own profession he was honoured with the affection of Bishops. Trelawney, Gastrell, and Smalridge, and Dr. Sacheverell; though he excited the hostility of Hoadly, Wake, Burnet, and Tenison. Such were his coadjutors and opponents to the period of his arbitrary. banishment, when he was obliged to mingle in a new set of associates, who endeavoured to support the claims of the son of James II.-the Dukes of Ormonde and Wharton, Lord Marischal Keith, Lochiel, and the rest of that brilliant staff of adventurers and enthusiasts who sacrificed their fortunes or their lives in his service-including the traitors who took bribes to betray its secrets. Partic

Atterbury's relations with his home circle;

for as he was honoured as a prelate, and esteemed as a statesman, he was loved as a parent. The episode in his career in which his daughter figures, must be classed amongst the most touching ever narrated.-WILLIAMS, FOLKESTONE, 1869, Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Atterbury, Preface, vol. I, p. ix.

Francis Atterbury, the most accomplished and eloquent of the Tory clergymen, became Bishop of Rochester, though sorely against the wishes of Anne who, while sympathizing with his doctrine, held in abhorrence the factiousness of his temper.-WYON, FREDERICK WILLIAM, 1876, The History of Great Britain During the Reign of Queen Anne, vol. II, p. 465.

The most brilliant tribune, orator, and pamphleteer of the High Church party. -LECKY, WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE, 1877, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, p. 272.

There is no Churchman of the day whose virtues as well as faults stand out in lineaments so clearly marked as those of Atterbury. There is no doubt now as to Atterbury's guilt: but it was then concealed from his friends by a process of Jesuitical prevarication, which leaves on Atterbury's character a worse stain even than that of treason, especially in a case where treason might be so far conscientious, and was at least not

uncommon.

But Jesuitical as he was in this episode of his life, insincerity was not Atterbury's common failing. He had left amongst the circle a memory which was not without its lasting effect. From him they had imbibed that refusal to subscribe to the tenet of the Whigs which regarded the Revolution as the beginning and end of the Constitution. From his

whole character, his love of extremes, his anxiety to play a sensational part in some exciting drama, his resolute refusal to regard prudence or expediency in his bigoted attachment to a cause, even from his fiery vanity, the Bishop was fitted to make a deep and lasting impression upon those amongst whom his life had lain. Warm and loving in all his private relations, with the tenderness of a woman, and the courage, if not the calm judgment, of a man, he held his place in the hearts of his friends, and made it impossible for them to believe that his public acts could be stained by duplicity and treason: and

not a little of their indignant protest against the Government of Walpole, not a little of their claim to be the assertors of liberty in an age which bowed before a political autocrat, is to be traced to the work, to the spirit, to the trial, and to the banishment of Atterbury.-CRAIK, HENRY, 1882, The Life of Jonathan Swift, pp. 97, 375.

At Marlborough's funeral we see for the last time in high public estate one of the few Englishmen of the day who could properly be named in the same breath with Marlborough. This was Francis Atterbury, the eloquent and daring Bishop of Rochester. His was not a very reverential spirit. There was as little of the temper of pious sanctity in Atterbury as in Swift himself. The allusion to the last scene of pompous vanity might have had another significance, as well as that which Atterbury meant to give to it. Amid the pomp in which Marlborough's career went out the career of Atterbury went out as well, although in a different way, and not closed sublimely by death. Francis Atterbury

may rank among the most conspicuous public men of his time. He stands only just beneath Marlborough, and Bolingbroke, and Walpole. Atterbury

had, however, among his many gifts a dangerous gift of political intrigue. Like Swift, and Dubois, and Alberoni, he was at least as much statesman as churchman. He had mixed himself up in various intrigues--some of them could hardly be called conspiracies--for the restoration of the Stuarts, and when at last something like a new conspiracy was planned, it was not likely that he would be left out of it. -MCCARTHY, JUSTIN, 1884, A History of the Four Georges, vol. 1, pp. 278, 281, 282.

Atterbury cannot be regarded as a perfect character or as a great divine, but he was a very able man, and in his way a brave, faithful son of the church. If he mingled politics too much with religion it must be remembered in justice to him that the two subjects were so strangely mixed up in that eventful time that it was all but impossible for a public character to disentangle the one from the other. His name will always be a prominent one in the complicated history of the church and nation of England, in the later part of the seventeenth and the early part of

the eighteenth century.-OVERTON, JOHN HENRY, 1885, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. II, p. 237.

BOYLE-BENTLEY CONTROVERSY "A Short Review of the Controversy bewteen Mr. Boyle and Dr. Bentley," the author of which, I have no hesitation in believing, from the style as well as other evidence, to be Atterbury himself. The professed objects of the piece are, to apologize for Mr. Boyle, and to decry the presumption and ill-manners of his opponent: but from all questions of learning, the only objects in the controversy worth attention, it carefully abstains, and thereby conveys a tacit but perfect confession of Bentley's triumph. Though the style is caustic and polished, yet its general effect is feeble; being little more than a repetition of the criminating charges of Boyle's book, subdued and diluted by an unwilling moderation. Notwithstanding the popularity of Atterbury, this tract produced little or no sensation: in fact, it appears shortly after its birth to have. sunk into oblivion. -MONK, JAMES HENRY, 1830, The Life of Richard Bentley, vol. I, p. 178.

Out came the reply to Bentley, bearing the name of Boyle, but in truth written by Atterbury, with the assistance of Smalridge and others. A most remarkable book it is, and often reminds us of Goldsmith's observation, that the French would be the best cooks in the world if they had any butcher's meat, for that they can make ten dishes out of a nettle top. It really deserves the praise, whatever that praise may be worth, of being the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he was profoundly ignorant. The learning The learning of the confederacy is that of a schoolboy, and not of an extraordinary schoolboy; but it is used with the skill and address of most able, artful, and experienced men; it is beaten out to the very thinnest leaf, and is disposed in such a way as to seem ten times larger than it is. The dexterity with which they avoid grappling with those parts of the subject with which they know themselves to be incompetent to deal is quite wonderful.-MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1836, Sir William Temple, Edinburgh Review; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

SERMONS

When Willis of Ephraim heard Rochester preach,

Thus Bentley said to him, "I pr'ythee, dear brother,

How likest thou this sermon? 'tis out of my reach."

"His is one way, (said Willis) and ours is another;

I care not for carping; but this I can tell, We preached very sadly, if he preaches well." -PRIOR, MATTHEW, 1721? Doctors Differ, Epigram.

The day was so bad I could not even go to church here, so the Dean gave us prayers at home, and we read one of Atterbury's sermons; they are at present our Sunday reading, and charming sermons they are: I am not critic deep enough to find fault with them: his doctrine to me appears very good and his language elegant and pure.-DELANY, MRS. (MARY GRANVILLE), 1751, Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, vol. III, p. 37.

Sir John Pringle had expressed a wish that I would ask Dr. Johnson's opinion what were the best English sermons for style. "Atterbury?" Johnson: "Yes, Sir, one of the best."-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1778, Life by Boswell, ed. Hill, vol. III, p. 281.

The Sermons of Atterbury attracted great attention from the first, and soon gave rise to controversies which we have merely time to refer to. Hoadley, Burnet, and Wake, were no mean antagonists, but our champion seems never to have been intimidated by numbers or awed by the fear of names.-ALLIBONE, S. AUSTIN, 1854-58, A Dictionary of English Literature, vol. I, p. 80.

Reading the sermons in cold blood, and deprived of all the charm of delivery, we find them in substance wonderfully like other sermons of the time. The deists are refuted, and virtue is recommended in the ordinary method; though Hoadly discovered traces of the hated sacerdotal taint. The style is not unworthy of the friend and critic of the most brilliant writers of the day; and here and there, as in the sermon on the death of poor Lady Cutts, at the age of eighteen, the pathos has not entirely evaporated. But there are no traces of real power of thought or depth of emotion. They are the performances of a very able man, who is a politician before he is an

ecclesiastic, and a Tory more distinctly than a High-Churchman. In other times, Atterbury might have been a Laud or a Wolsey; in the eighteenth century his ambition could end only by sacrificing his talents and energy to the most contemptible of all pretenders. The spirit of the age enervates his religious thought as well as his political principles.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, p. 345.

Unfortunately Atterbury's literary gifts, like his oratory, lack the merit of permanence, and his sermons, more conspicuous for eloquence than for the weightiness of matter, although extremely popular at the time, have long ceased to be read.-DENNIS, JOHN, 1894, The Age of Pope, p. 207.

It is a great drop, say, from the sermons of Isaac Barrow to those of Francis Atterbury. OVERTON, JOHN HENRY, 1897, The Church in England, vol. II, p. 206.

GENERAL

Though Dr. Atterbury be a man of a very sharp pen, and of very quick parts, yet I do not look upon him to be a man of extraordinary depth. He has not a true genius to the study of antiquities; nor has he taken much pains to make himself a master of our English history. He may be cryed up for a master of style, and 'twill not be denyed; yet this however must be granted withall, that affectation of wit and satyr does not become a grave subject, and Mr. Hooker, bishop Sanderson, and others, are rather to be followed in such sort of writing; whilst the study of witty expressions is to be looked upon as levity, and more proper for juvenile essays. HEARNE, THOMAS, 1710-11, Reliquiæ Hearnianæ, ed. Bliss, Jan. 16, vol. 1, p. 215.

in classical scholarship were enlivened and decorated by the finest spirit of wit and humor. CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. II, p. 205.

His diction is not quite so pure as Swift's or Addison's; and it is easy in the sense of fluent and racy, not in the sense of languid.-MINTO, WILLIAM, 1872-80, Manual of English Prose Literature, p. 398.

On all quesitons pertaining to the niceties of criticism he was an unerring guide, for his judgment was clear and solid, his perception fine, and his taste pure even to fastidiousness. In no contemporary critic had Pope so much confidence.COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON, 1893, Jonathan Swift, p. 96.

Atterbury's life was one too much. engaged in ecclesiastical controversy, in political intrigue, and in schemes of personal ambition, to allow him much time for literature; and what he has left (beyond his correspondence) is small in bulk. But it may always be read with pleasure as the composition of one who studied minutely, and with an eye careful of effect, all the details of style, and the fundamental sincerity of whose nature, with its vivid contrasts of light and shadow, serves to give a certain picturesqueness and variety to his diction. But above all his letters are models of epistolary style.-CRAIK, HENRY, 1894, English Prose, vol. III, p. 459.

PERSONAL

He lived in obscure lodgings in London, and betook himself to the profession of physic, but was never able to acquire much practice. I once heard a London physician, who had married the daughter of one of that trade, mention him as a good sort of man, and one that he was acquainted with, and at the same time assert a fact, which I suppose he had learned from Mandeville, that the children of women addicted to dram-drinking, were never troubled with the rickets. He is said to have been coarse and overbearing in his manners where he durst be so; yet a great flatterer of some vulgar Dutch merchants, who allowed him a pension. This last information comes from a clerk of a city attorney, through whose hands. the money passed.-HAWKINS, SIR JOHN, 1787, Life of Samuel Johnson, p. 263, note.

FABLE OF THE BEES
1705-28

The fallacy of that book is, that Mandeville defines neither vices nor benefits. I read Mandeville forty, or, I believe, fifty years ago. He did not He did not puzzle me; he opened my views into real life very much.-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1778, Life, ed. Boswell.

With respect to his capital and offensive paradox, that private vices are public benefits, Mandeville's whole art consists in denominating our passions by the appellation assigned to their vicious excess, and then proving them, under this denomination, useful to society. There is a lively force, and caustic though coarse wit, in his performance, which occasionally reminds one of Paine.GREEN, THOMAS, 1779-1810, Diary of a Lover of Literature.

Mandeville was a man wholly destitute of morality, and without insight into the nature of man or the connexions between bodily and mental soundness and well-being. This book no man would now trouble himself to read.SCHLOSSER, FREIDRICH CHRISTOPH, 1823, History of the Eighteenth Century.

If Shakspeare had written a book on

the motives of human actions, it is by no means certain that it would have been a good one. It is extremely improbable that it would have contained half so much able reasoning on the subject as is to be found in the "Fable of the Bees." But could Mandeville have created an Iago? Well as he knew how to resolve characters into their elements, would he have been. able to consider those elements in such a manner as to make up a man, a real, living, individual man?-MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1825, Milton, Edinburgh Review; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

Though licentious, and in many respects objectionable, there are a great number of valuable remarks and of just and profound observations in this work, especially with reference to the improvement of arts and the increase of wealth.-MCCULLOCH, JOHN RAMSAY, 1845, Literature of Political Economy.

The book occasioned a great commotion; but it is now generally admitted that, whatever may be the worth, or worthlessness, of the philosophical system propounded in it, the author's object was not an immoral one. Independently altogether of its general principles and conclusions, the work is full both of curious matter and vigorous writing.-CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. II, p. 253.

The work possesses no literary merit. ANGUS, JOSEPH, 1865, The Handbook of English Literature, p. 509.

His humour is the coarsest of the coarse, but he cannot be denied great wit, happy expression, and ingenious illustrations.MINTO, WILLIAM, 1872-80, Manual of English Prose Literature, p. 401.

It represented strongly the increasing tendency to dwell upon the evils of society. as a result of over-civilisation, and anticipated the teaching of those philosophers who saw no hope of a return to innocence but by returning to the state of nature. Mandeville argued, not, like Shaftesbury, that all is for good, but that the world is bad, and its whole civilisation