1828.] Echard’s Contempt of Clergy. 579 
gusting filth—to one of our queens ; with a boast, in his preface, that he 
had been a favourite of all the preceding monarchs of England : and he 
spoke the truth. Dryden informs us that he has often seen King Charles 
the Second leaning on Tom’s shoulders, to balance his unsteady feet, 
while Tom held a music-book to the king, who, in that posture, sang 
the bass to the poet’s treble, in presence of the court. 
The prose-writers took care that their style should be as familiar as that 
of the poet. The excess of their slipslop is scarcely credible to any one who 
has not examined them with some attention. Their sentences continually 
remind us of the low drolling of hackney-coachmen, or the eloquence of Bil- 
lingsgate. They appear actually to revel in nasty allusions, and are never 
deterred from hunting out a dirty simile to its minutest particulars, or 
from expatiating on a dirty story in its fullest details, from any squeam- 
ishness about a word. Swift, who was born in their time, borrowed this 
particular from them ; and he is the last of our writers to whom the 
reproach applies. It is from him rather than from Addison that we 
should date our present prose style—though occasionally, and particu- 
larly in his earliest composition, the Tale of a Tub, some traces of the 
school of Charles are visible. 
Sir Roger L’Estrange was perhaps the person who carried this mode 
of writing to its highest—except, perhaps, Sir Thomas Urquhart, in his 
translation of Rabelais. Urquhart had some apology in the original on 
which he was employed, though by no means so much as is imagined 
by those who have not examined Rabelais himself. Lord Woodhouselee 
would not have pronounced Sir Thomas’s translation as absolutely per- 
fect, if he had consulted the original with any care. In the boisterous 
and roaring parts of that strange romance, Sir Thomas is certainly at 
home : but he misses altogether the grave tone of Rabelais, and is quite at a 
loss when he attempts to convey the frequent touches of severe and stern 
irony, which abound amid bursts of buffoon and tumultuous merriment. 
But, certainly, except Sir Thomas, no other person can claim equal 
honour in this particular with his brother knight, Sir Roger. In his 
translation of A:sop, it is quite amusing to hear the language of the 
coffee-houses and taverns of the Strand or Fleet-street, the “ bargain- 
selling” of the green-rooms, or the cogging language of the Mint or 
Southwark, then the refuge of runaway-debtors, and other persons out 
of sorts with fortune—put into the mouth of the wild animals roaming in 
the forest. The lions, wolves, foxes, and sheep of Sir Roger were all 
qualified, by wit and manners, to sit as critics in the first rows of the pit 
on the night of a new piece, and to give their opinions upon it with all 
the modish grace of a town gallant over a flask of burnt claret at the 
Devil Tavern. In serious writers the same defects were visible. Locke’s 
style is vulgar and slovenly. Burnet is filled with low colloquialisms, 
which have rendered him the butt of Swift. The same might indeed 
be said of all writers of the time: but we intend to speak only of 
Echard. 
Laurence Echard was born in Suffolk, in 1636, and admitted of Catha- 
rine Hall, Cambridge, in 1655. He became, in process of time, Master 
of that Hall, and Vice-Chancellor of the University. He died in 1697, 
having spent a peaceful life in literary leisure. His principal works must 
have cost him little trouble, being merely thrown off to amuse himself. 
He writes precisely in the style which we have been describing, and the 
subjects on which he occupied his pen were those in which it is most 
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