Excerpt from Sir Roger Lestrange a Contribution to the History of the Press in the Seventeenth Century
But few even of those who are capable of relishing the distinction between fine classical work and the rude incult native will have the patience to read his political works. Gnarled, bitter, black, and wasted, are these products of seventeenth -century strife. Their great quality is one which is generally lacking in present-day writing, they are virile. Their abuse - the staple of the kind - is virile. There is no verbal finesse, none of the tricks of the sophist. They are almost lacking in rhetoric in the popular sense. But for late events in the north-east corner of Ireland, we might have said that. The causes they championed are for gotten. The minor characters at least are lost to all save the special student.
But his story may still attract the historically-minded. He had the gift or misfortune which some men have of entangling themselves with every interest of the day music, the Royal Society, cavalier song and wit at the one end of the social scale, at the other, war, intrigue, imprison ment, office and the thousand bitternesses of public life. A mere instrument he was not. He went further and more rapidly than his masters. In a sense he became the mind of his party. A picturesque figure is all the relations of life
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