The New International Encyclopædia/Budgell, Eustace

BUDG′ELL, Eustace (1686-1737). An English essayist and miscellaneous writer. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford, and at the Inner Temple, and was admitted to the bar. In 1709 he was appointed a clerk, and in 1715 under-secretary to his second cousin, Joseph Addison, who in those years was Secretary for Ireland. He also held office as chief secretary to the lords justices and deputy clerk of the council, and was elected to the Irish House of Commons. In 1717, upon Addison's departure for England to become first Secretary of State, he obtained through him the lucrative post of Accountant-General. Soon, however, he quarreled with Webster, the new Secretary for Ireland, lost his places, and returned to England. Having invested in Law's South Sea Scheme, he lost, he says, “above twenty thousand pounds . . . by that notorious piece of villainy.” He wrote violent pamphlets against the Government, and from February, 1733, to June, 1735, published The Bee, a weekly periodical. Already in poverty, harassed by controversies and suits at law, and apparently mentally unbalanced, he was, in 1733, accused of having made away with a bond for £1000 advanced to him by Matthew Tindal, and with having entered interpolations in Tindal's will. The charge, though not proved, rendered him desperate, and he drowned himself in the Thames. He wrote for the Spectator, for the most part over the signature ‘X.,’ thirty-seven papers, of which “Sir Roger as a Hunter” (No. 110, Friday, July 13, 1711) is perhaps as good as any. He was also the author of a translation (1714) of the Χαρακτῆρες of Theophrastus, and of the Memoirs of the Life and Character of the Late Earl of Orrery and the Family of the Boyles (1732). For an autobiographic account of his grievances, consult his Liberty and Property: A Pamphlet (London, 1732).