Born, at Hunstanton, 17 Dec. 1616. Probably educated at Cambridge. To Scotland with army of Charles I., 1639. Sentenced, by House of Commons, to death for share in Royalist plot, 28 Dec. 1644. Imprisoned till spring of 1648, when he escaped from Newgate with connivance of Governor. At first went to Kent, carrying on Royalist propaganda; but soon withdrew to Holland. Returned to England, Aug. 1653. Active political pamphleteer. Appointed Surveyor of the Imprimery, 15 Aug. 1663. Married Mary Doleman. Edited “The Kingdom’s Intelligencer,” and “The News,” each weekly, Aug. 1663 to Jan. 1666. Edited (and wrote) “The Observator,” April 1681 to March 1687. M.P. for Winchester, March 1685. Arrested on political charge 3 March 1696. Imprisoned till May 1696. Died, in London, 11 Dec. 1704. Buried in the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. Works: His literary works (exclusive of a large number of controversial pamphlets and such works as “The Gentleman Pothecary,” 1678, and “Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister,” posth., 1734) consist of the following translations: F. de Quevedo Villegas’ “Visions,” 1667; Cardinal Bona’s “Guide to Eternity,” 1672; M. d’ Alcoforado’s “Five Love Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier,” 1678; “Tully’s Offices,” 1680; “Twenty Select Colloquies of Erasmus,” 1680; “The Spanish Decameron,” 1687; “The Fables of Æsop,” 1692; Seneca’s “Morals,” 1693; Terence’s “Comedies,” 1698; “Tacitus,” 1698; Flavius Josephus’ Works, 1702.

  In 1663 he published a pamphlet entitled, “Considerations and Proposals in order to the Regulation of the Press; together with Diverse Instances of Treasonous and Seditious Pamphlets, proving the necessity thereof.” This got him the post of Licenser, in succession to Sir John Birkenhead, and also “all the sole privilege of printing and publishing all narratives, advertisements, Mercuries, intelligencers, diurnals, and other books of public intelligence.” He began business at the end of August, 1663, with “The Public Intelligencer.”… In November, 1665, when the plague in London had driven the Court to Oxford, appeared No. 1 of “The Oxford Gazette.” When the Court returned to London, it appeared, on the 5th of February, 1666, as “The London Gazette,” under which name it still exists. It was placed at once under Sir Joseph Williamson, Under-Secretary of State (from whom Addison had his Christian name), and his deputy writer of it was, for the first five years, Charles Perrot, M.A., of Oriel. L’Estrange set up, in November, 1675, the first commercial journal, “The City Mercury,” and in 1679 an “Observator,” in defence of the king’s party. In April, 1680, the first literary journal appeared, as a weekly or fortnightly catalogue of new books, the “Mercurius Librarius.”

Personal

  A man of fine conversation, I think, but I am sure most courtly and full of compliments.

  A man of a good wit, and a fancy very luxuriant, and of an enterprising nature.

  A gentleman whom I had long known, and a person of excellent parts abating some affectations.

  Sir Roger was but ill-rewarded by the Tories, for having been their champion; the latter part of his life was clouded with poverty, and though he descended in peace to the grave, free from political turmoils, yet as he was bowed down with age and distress, he cannot be said to have died in comfort. He had seen much of the world, examined many characters, experienced the vicissitudes of fortune, and was as well instructed as any man that ever lived, in the important lesson of human life, viz. That all things are vanity.

  L’Estrange had many domestic difficulties. His wife gambled; he had always suffered pecuniary difficulties; His grand-nephew, he admits, did him “many charitable offices,” and he received frequent presents from admirers personally unknown to him in acknowledgement of his public services. Pope’s sneer in a letter to Swift, that the tory party “never gave him sixpence to keep him from starving” does not seem wholly justifiable. But he had to depend for his livelihood mainly on his pen, and the hackwork that he did for the booksellers as a translator only brought him a precarious income.

General

  Those who shall consider the number and greatness of his books, will admire he should ever write so many; and those who have read them, considering the skill and method they are written in, will admire he should write so well. Nor is he less happy in verse than in prose, which for elegance of language, and quickness of invention, deservedly entitles him to the honour of a poet.

  He was certainly a very great master of the English tongue.

  The chief manager of all those angry writings was one Sir Roger L’Estrange, a man who had lived in all the late times, and was furnished with many passages and an unexhausted copiousness in writing: so that for four years he published three or four sheets a week under the title of the “Observator,” all tending to defame the contrary party, and to make the clergy apprehend that their ruin was designed.

  Sir Roger’s works indeed are often calculated for the meanest capacities, and the phrase is consequently low; but a man must be greatly under the influence of prejudice, who can discover no genius in his writings; nor an intimate acquaintance with the state of parties, human life, and manners.

  L’Estrange, who was by no means so bad a writer as some have represented him, was sunk in party faction, and having generally the worst side of the argument, often had recourse to scolding, pertness, and consequently a vulgarity that discovers itself even in his more liberal compositions. He was the first writer who regularly enlisted himself under the banners of a party for pay, and fought for it through right and wrong for upwards of forty literary campaigns. This intrepidity gained him the esteem of Cromwell himself, and the papers he wrote even just before the revolution, almost with the rope about his neck, have his usual characters of impudence and perseverance. That he was a standard-writer cannot be disowned, because a great many very eminent authors formed their style by his. But his standard was far from being a just one; though, when party considerations are set aside, he certainly was possessed of elegance, ease, and perspicuity.

  His Esop’s “Fables” was more a new work than a translation. The most valuable of his books is his translation of Josephus, which, though in a better style than most of his writings, has been very justly censured. He was one of the great corrupters of our language, by excluding vowels and other letters not commonly pronounced, and introducing pert and affected phrases.

  Sir Roger L’Estrange among his rivals was esteemed as the most perfect model of political writing. He was a strong party-writer on the government side, for Charles the Second, and the compositions of the author seem to us coarse, yet they contain much idiomatic expression. His Æsop’s Fables are a curious specimen of familiar style. Queen Mary showed a due contempt of him after the Revolution, by this anagram:—

  The pattern of bad writing in this respect was Sir Roger L’Estrange: his Æsop’s Fables will present every thing that is hostile to good taste; yet, by a certain wit and readiness in raillery, L’Estrange was a popular writer, and may even now be read, perhaps, with some amusement.

  “Eminent writer in the 17th century,” who eminently displays the worse characteristics of that period of our literature.

  L’Estrange was by no means deficient in readiness and shrewdness; and his diction, though coarse, and disfigured by a mean and flippant jargon which then passed for wit in the green-room and the tavern, was not without keenness and vigour. But his nature, at once ferocious and ignoble, showed itself in every line that he penned.

  All the translations [Quevedo] I have seen are bad. The best is that of L’Estrange, or at least the most spirited; but still L’Estrange is not always faithful when he knew the meaning, and he is sometimes unfaithful from ignorance. Indeed, the great popularity of his translations was probably owing, in some degree, to the additions he boldly made to his text, and the frequent accommodations he hazarded of its jests to the scandal and tastes of his times by allusions entirely English and local.

  He excelled in the coarse derision and invective—the rough give-and-take of the time; so much so, that he has been, absurdly enough, accused of corrupting the English language. He earned the hatred of lovers of freedom by his opposition to the emancipation of the press (which was accomplished in 1694), and by his rude exercise of authority while he was himself censor; but these offences may fairly enough be considered the accidents of his time and his position.

  As a controversialist, L’Estrange was bold, lively, and vigorous, but coarse, impudent, abusive, and by no means a scrupulous regarder of truth.

  L’Estrange has been accused of corrupting the language, and certainly he was not in the habit of inquiring too closely into the parentage or the associations of any term that seemed to him either striking or appropriate. But in literature we are to judge by results, and here the result is plainly a style so idiomatic, so pungent, and so telling as completely to justify his audacity. The flat-nosed, hunch-backed, blubber-lipped, big-bellied, baker-legged Æsop; the wife of Xanthus, horribly bold, meddling and expensive, easily put off the hooks and hard to be pleased again; the kite who comes powdering down on the frogs and mice; the lark who goes out progging for food for little ones; the snake lazing at his length in the gleam of the sun; the weasel who tried what she could do with her wits when she could live no longer upon the square;—these and a thousand other vivid and surprising turns of phrase must delight all but the purist as surely as they demonstrate the possibility of a literary employment of “slang” which, if attempted by any but an artist, would result in nothing save imbecility, vulgarity, and nonsense.

  He has a permanent place in history as the first “able editor,” who not only made his journal the vehicle for political discussions, and availed himself of regular news-letters, but employed a regular staff of assistants to collect news…. L’Estrange’s prose style is bad, but he was the author of several useful translations…. He was a courtly and well-bred man, of considerable culture, and would be mentioned with more respect if he had not exercised a function detestable to the entire republic of letters. Dr. Johnson regarded him as the first writer upon record who regularly enlisted himself under the banners of a party for pay, and fought for it through right and wrong. This is probably correct as a mere statement of fact, but unjust if it was intended to imply any doubt of the purity of L’Estrange’s motives in serving the high monarchial party, or of the sincerity of his advocacy of its principles.