The rift between Pope and Oldmixon can perhaps be dated from the publication by the latter in 1714 of the "Receipt to make a cuckold" with great apologies for its indecency. Oldmixon continued to tempt satiric fate in the ensuing years, and one wonders if, when seeking a substitute for the Dunciad in the "last" Miscellany of 1728, Pope may not have remembered Oldmixon's announcement in 1726 of his intention to publish an Essay on Criticism which was to be written after the manner of Bouhours. It is not impossible that this was one of many influences acting upon Pope to organize the "high flights of poetry" he had been collecting over the years for a Scriblerian project. Oldmixon appears, with Gildon and Dennis, among the porpoises in Chapter VI of Peri Bathous, and the presentation of some of the material in the Bathous, although more directly indebted to Longinus, does bring Oldmixon's Essay to mind.
It would seem that Oldmixon felt that more than the porpoises referred to him, for in his translation and adaptation of Bouhours' La Manière De Bien Penser, which he published under the title of The Arts of Logic and Rhetorick later in 1728, the references to Pope are much harsher, and Swift also comes under more pointed attack. Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of A Tub (already censured by Oldmixon in his Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter), the Essay on Criticism, Windsor Forest and the Homer are the objects of bitter criticism. In the concluding pages of The Arts of Logic and Rhetorick Oldmixon wrote:
This delicate Author [Pope] has written a rhiming Essay on Criticism, and made himself merry with his Brethren in a notable Treatise call'd the Art of Sinking, to which he and his Partner S——t, have contributed, more than all the rest of their contemporary writers, if Trifling and Grimace are not in the high Parts of Writing.... What a Precipice is it from Locke's Human Understanding to Swift's Lilliput and Profundity!... there might have been Hopes of rising again; but we sink now like Ships laden with Lead, and must despair of ever recovering the Height from which we have fallen.[3]
As we move from Oldmixon's Essay on Criticism to Pope's Peri Bathous and on to The Arts of Logic and Rhetorick, we perhaps hear the stretching of the spring on a trap, that snapped in the 1735 edition of the Dunciad, in which Oldmixon replaced Dennis as the "Senior" diver "Who but to sink the deeper, rose the higher."[4]
The Essay on Criticism is, however, more than an example of the inter-relation of literature and politics in the eighteenth century; and it is more than a step on the way to its author's immortalizing in lead. It presents, albeit not very imaginatively, a statement of many of the literary theories and attitudes of the Augustan period. However brief and incomplete, the remarks about the language of poetry and upon the effects of certain literary passages are of interest as imperfect exercises in a type of practical criticism. The material used by Oldmixon and the literary references he makes indicate, as do many of his other writings, that, although he was a "scribbler for a party," he was a man of some literary sense, taste and intelligence.
Robert Madden, C.S.B.
St. Michael's College
University of Toronto
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1.] The Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter was reprinted with an introduction by Louis Landa by the Augustan Reprint Society, no. 15 (1948).
[2.] The issue which appeared separately is the same as that which was appended to the first volume of the Critical History, save for the price, 1s. 6d, printed on the title page.