seas
to oppress and plunder her, critics easily detected his style. When the
rebellion of 1715 broke out, he refused to sign the paper in which the
bishops of the province of Canterbury declared their attachment to the
Protestant succession. He busied himself in electioneering, especially
at Westminster, where, as dean, he possessed great influence; and
was, indeed, strongly suspected of having once set on a riotous mob to
prevent his Whig fellow-citizens from polling.

After having been long in indirect communication with the exiled family,
he, in 1717, began to correspond directly with the Pretender. The first
letter of the correspondence is extant. In that letter Atterbury boasts
of having, during many years past, neglected no opportunity of serving
the Jacobite cause. "My daily prayer," he says, "is that you may have
success. May I live to see that day, and live no longer than I do what
is in my power to forward it." It is to be remembered that he who wrote
thus was a man bound to set to the church of which he was overseer an
example of strict probity; that he had repeatedly sworn allegiance to
the House of Brunswick; that he had assisted in placing the crown on
the head of George I., and that he had abjured James III., "without
equivocation or mental reservation, on the true faith of a Christian."

It is agreeable to turn from his public to his private life. His
turbulent spirit, wearied with faction and treason, now and then
required repose, and found it in domestic endearments, and in the
society of the most illustrious of the living and of the dead. Of his
wife little is known: but between him and his daughter there was an
affection singularly close and tender. The gentleness of his manners
when he was in the company of a few friends was such as seemed hardly
credible to those who knew him only by his writings and speeches. The
charm of his "softer hour" has been commemorated by one of those friends
in imperishable verse. Though Atterbury's classical attainments were not
great, his taste in English literature was excellent; and his admiration
of genius was so strong that it overpowered even his political and
religious antipathies. His fondness for Milton, the mortal enemy of the
Stuarts and of the church, was such as to many Tories seemed a crime. On
the sad night on which Addison was laid in the chapel of Henry VII., the
Westminster boys remarked that Atterbury read the funeral service with a
peculiar tendern