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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.

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