INTRODUCTION
John Oldmixon's Essay on Criticism, like his Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to the Earl of Oxford, about the English Tongue,[1] provides evidence to support Dr. Johnson's description of its author as a "scribbler for a party," and indicates that Oldmixon must have been devoted to gathering examples of what appeared to him to be the good and bad in literature.
The story of the appearance of the Essay on Criticism in 1728 should begin in 1724, when Oldmixon published in one volume his Critical History of England, Ecclesiastical and Civil. Dr. Zachary Grey's criticism of this book was answered by Oldmixon in 1725 in A Review of Dr. Zachary Grey's Defence of our Ancient and Modern Historians. In 1726 a two-volume edition of the Critical History of England appeared with the 1725 edition of the Review of Dr. Zachary Grey's Defence appended to the first volume. In the preface to the second volume of the Critical History Oldmixon referred to the Essay on Criticism, stating that it was ready for the press, but that since it would have made the second volume too large, it would be published at a later date. The Essay, he stated, was to prepare the public for his translation of Abbe Bouhours' La Manière De Bien Penser. It was not, however, until 1728 that the Essay reached the public. Besides appearing separately, it was appended, in place of the now removed answer to Dr. Grey, to the "third" edition of the Critical History.[2] There is no reference to the addition of the Essay in the preface to the first volume, but its appearance and addition is referred to in the preface to the second volume.
Oldmixon seems to have had more than one purpose for writing the Essay; one of them is made quite clear in the second paragraph:
I shall not, in this Essay, enter into the philosophical Part of Criticism which Corneille complains of, and that Aristotle and his Commentators have treated of Poetry, rather as Philosophers than Poets. I shall not attempt to give Reasons why Thoughts are sublime, noble, delicate, agreeable, and the like, but content my self with producing Examples of every Kind of right Thinking, and leave it to Authors of more Capacity and Leisure, to treat the Matter à Fond, and teach us to imitate our selves what we admire in others.
The remarks concerning the English need for guidance in "right thinking" are obviously intended to prepare a public for Oldmixon's translation of Bouhours' La Manière De Bien Penser. Following the method of Bouhours, who was in turn following Longinus, Oldmixon gives examples from English literature of the various divisions of "right thinking" and, also like Bouhours, he includes specimens of failures in this art. The bad examples he presents provide ample evidence that the Essay was also serving a Whig polemical purpose, for they are drawn from such writers as Clarendon, Pope and, in particular, Laurence Echard. The tone and nature of Oldmixon's remarks on Echard, whose History he had already criticized at length in the second volume of the Critical History, can be seen in this explanation of his general treatment of that author:
I must sincerely acknowledge, that it was not for Want of Will, that I did not mention what is beautiful in our Historian, but for Want of Opportunity.
Oldmixon's remarks on Pope's Homer are sometimes laudatory, but more often patronizing; the criticism of Pope's Essay on Criticism is quite pointed:
I dare not say any Thing of the last Essay on Criticism in Verse, but that if any more curious Reader has discovered in it something new, which is not in Dryden's Prefaces, Dedications, and his Essay on Dramatick Poetry, not to mention the French Criticks, I should be very glad to have the Benefit of the Discovery.