Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 3   By: Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay (1800-1859)

Contributions To The Encyclopaedia Britannica And Miscellaneous Poems, Inscriptions, Etc.

By Thomas Babington Macaulay

VOLUME III.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA

AND

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.

CONTENTS.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA.

Francis Atterbury. (December 1853)

John Bunyan. (May 1854)

Oliver Goldsmith. (February 1856)

Samuel Johnson. (December 1856)

William Pitt. (January 1859)

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.

Epitaph on Henry Martyn. (1812)

Lines to the Memory of Pitt. (1813)

A Radical War Song. (1820)

The Battle of Moncontour. (1824)

The Battle of Naseby, by Obadiah Bind their kings in chains and their nobles with links of iron, Serjeant in Ireton's Regiment. (1824)

Sermon in a Churchyard. (1825)

Translation of a Poem by Arnault. (1826)

Dies Irae. (1826)

The Marriage of Tirzah and Ahirad. (1827)

The Country Clergyman's Trip to Cambridge. An Election Ballad. (1827)

Song. (1827)

Political Georgics. (March 1828)

The Deliverance of Vienna. (1828)

The Last Buccaneer. (1839)

Epitaph on a Jacobite. (1845)

Lines Written in August, 1847.

Translation from Plautus. (1850)

Paraphrase of a Passage in the Chronicle of the Monk of St Gall. (1856)

Inscription on the Statue of Lord Wm. Bentinck, at Calcutta. (1835)

Epitaph on Sir Benjamin Heath Malkin, at Calcutta. (1837)

Epitaph on Lord Metcalfe. (1847)

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA.

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.