The Preface to the Aeneis of Virgil (1718)

Publication Numbers 214-215
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1982
GENERAL EDITOR David Stuart Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles EDITORS Charles L. Batten, University of California, Los Angeles George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles Thomas Wright, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library ADVISORY EDITORS Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Earl Miner, Princeton University Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota James Sutherland, University College, London Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Beverly J. Onley, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Frances M. Reed, University of California, Los Angeles

Nonetheless, Trapp survived and prospered. Under the Tories he had been for a time chaplain to Sir Constantine Phipps, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and shortly afterwards to Bolingbroke, who stood as godfather to Trapp's son Henry. During the Tory collapse, Peterborough presented him to the rectorship of Dauntsey in Wiltshire; Dr. Lancaster obtained for him the lectureship at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster; and in the 1730s Bolingbroke, restored, preferred him to the rectorship of Harlington, Middlesex. Other livings and the presidency of Sion College were to accrue for faithful service, as Trapp turned his pen to the defence of the established church: first against the Roman Catholics (for which, perhaps, the University of Oxford created him Doctor of Divinity in 1728) and later against the Methodists, especially in his discourses on The Nature, Folly, Sin, and Danger of being Righteous over much (1739).
Such engagements left him little time for literary creativity in the years before his death in 1747. However, Trapp finally finished his labors on Virgil by issuing a translation of the works (1731); and his poem Thoughts Upon the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell (1734-35) shows him attempting to combine literary pleasure with theological instruction—a potent mixture forcibly administered to his parishoners, for it is recorded that he desired in his will that a copy be presented to each housekeeper among them. The Paradisus Amissus, Latine Redditus appeared in 1741-44. This translation of Milton into Latin is more than a freak of the neoclassical mind. It is the natural complement to his earlier translation of the Aeneid into Miltonic blank verse as well as his attempt to judge the classic sublime by the achievement of the masterwork of Christian epic, a task that had preoccupied him as Oxford's Professor of Poetry.