Sir Roger L'Estrange(1616–1704)

English royalist polemicist, journalist, and translator who became one of Restoration England's most powerful gatekeepers of print. Appointed to oversee press licensing and suppression of 'seditious' publishing, he used pamphlets and his periodical The Observator to defend the Crown and attack political dissent; he also produced widely read translations and moralized adaptations, including an influential English edition of Aesop's Fables (1692).

Read by Thoreau (see Thoreau's Reading)