FRANCIS ATTERBURY, celebrated as a controversialist in politics and theology and immortalized by his dispute with Richard Bentley, was born in Buckinghamshire, England, in 1662. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and, taking orders in the Church of England, he rose to be Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster. Being detected in correspondence with the exiled Stuarts, he was banished. Much of his subsequent life was spent at the court of the Pretender in Rome or Paris. He died in France in 1732 still under sentence for treason. His classical scholarship has never been conceded by the partisans of Bentley in his day or our own. They admit his wit, his brilliancy, the extraordinary quality of his English style, and everything else except his knowledge of the subject in dispute,—the “Epistles” of Phalaris, which are not worth discussing at all now, even if they were then. There can be no real question of Bentley’s scholarship, and it may be true, as has been said of Atterbury, that a schoolboy knowing so little of the classics as he and pretending to know so much would have “deserved to be flogged—not refuted.” But there is no question of his power as a writer of English prose. In this respect at least he was no unworthy associate of Pope, Swift, and Addison, whose friend he was in the golden age of English essay-writing.