printer to the royal household and chapel, and had been placed by the King at the head of a great office in London from which theological tracts came forth by hundreds. Obadiah Walker's press was not less active at Oxford. But, with the exception of some bad translations of Bossuet's admirable works, these establishments put forth nothing of the smallest value. It was indeed impossible for any intelligent and candid Roman Catholic to deny that the champions of his Church were, in every talent and acquirement, completely over-matched. The ablest of them would not, on the other side, have been considered as of the third rate. Many of them, even when they had something to say, knew not how to say it. They had been excluded by their religion from English schools and universities; nor had they ever, till the accession of James, found England an agreeable, or even a safe, residence. They had therefore passed the greater part of their lives on the Continent, and had almost unlearned their mother tongue. When they preached, their outlandish accent moved the derision of the audience. They spelt like washerwomen. Their diction was disfigured by foreign idioms; and, when they meant to be eloquent, they imitated, as well as they could, what was considered as fine writing in those Italian academies where rhetoric had then reached the last stage of corruption. Disputants labouring under these disadvantages would scarcely, even with truth on their side, have been able to make head against men whose style is eminently distinguished by simple purity and grace.[1]
- ↑ Cardinal Howard spoke strongly to Burnet at Rome on this subject Burnet, i. 662. There is a curious passage to the same effect in a despatch of Barillon but I have mislaid the reference.
One of the Roman Catholic divines who engaged in this controversy, a Jesuit named Andrew Pulton, whom Mr. Oliver, in his biography of the Order, pronounces to have been a man of distinguished ability, very frankly owns his deficiencies. "A. P. having been eighteen years out of his own country, pretends not yet to any perfection of the English expression or orthography." His orthography is indeed deplorable. In one of his letters wright is put for write, woed for would. He challenged Tenison to dispute with him in Latin, that they might be on equal terms. In a contemporary satire, entitled The Advice, is the following couplet
"Send Pulton to be lashed at Busby's school,
That he in print no longer play the fool."Another Roman Catholic, named William Clench, wrote a treatise on the
