Page:The lives of the poets of Great Britain and Ireland to the time of Dean Swift - Volume 4.djvu/208

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HIS Gentleman, who has been more diſtinguiſhed as an hiſtorian than a poet, was the ſon of a clergyman, who by the death of his elder brother, became maſter of a good eſtate in Suffolk.

He received his education at the univerſity of Cambridge, entered into holy orders, and was preſented to the living of Welton and Elkington in Lincolnſhire, where he ſpent above twenty years of his life; and acquired a name by his writings, eſpecially the Hiſtory of England. This hiſtory was attacked by Dr. Edmund Calamy, in a letter to the author; in which, according to the Dr. the true principles of the Revolution, the Whigs and the Diſſenters are vindicated; and many perſons of diſtinction cleared from Mr Eachard’s aſperſions.

Mr. John Oldmixon, who was of very oppoſite principles to Eachard, ſeverely animadverted upon him in his Critical Hiſtory of England, during the reigns of the Stuarts; but as Oldmixon was a hireling, and a man ſtrongly biaſſed by party prejudices, little credit is due to his teſtimony: Which is moreover accompanied with a perpetual torrent of abuſe. Mr. Eachard’s general Eccleſiaſtical Hiſtory, from the nativity of Chriſt to the firſt eſtabliſhment of Chriſtianity by human laws, under the emperor Conſtantine the Great, has been much eſteemed. Our