Page:The Dunciad - Alexander Pope (1743).djvu/137

106 "Who flings most filth, and wide pollutes around "The stream, be his the Weekly Journals bound, "A pig of lead to him who dives the best; "A peck of coals a-piece shall glad the rest." In naked majesty Oldmixon stands 283. In naked majesty Oldmixon stands,) Mr., next to Mr. Dennis, the most ancient Critic of our Nation; an unjust censurer of Mr. Addison in his prose Essay on Criticism, whom also in his imitation of Bouhours (called the Arts of Logic and Rhetoric) he misrepresents in plain matter of fact; for in p. 45. he cites the Spectator as abusing Dr. Swift by name, where there is not the least hint of it; and in p. 304 is so injurious as to suggest, that Mr. Addison himself writ that Tatler, N. 43 which says of his own Simile, that Tis as great as ever entered into the mind of man. In Poetry he was not so happy as laborious, and therefore charačterised by the Tatler, N. 62. by the name of Omicron the Unborn Poet." Curl, Key, p. 13. "He writ Dramatic works, and a volume of Poetry, consisting of heroic Epistles, &c. some whereof are very well done," faith that great Judge Mr. Jacob, in his Lives of Poets, vol. ii. p. 303. In his Essay on Criticism, and the Arts of Logic and Rhetoric, he frequently reflects on our Author. But the top of his character was a Perverter of History, in that scandalous one of the Stuarts, in folio, and his Critical History of England, two volumes, octavo. Being employed by bishop Kennet, in publishing the Historians in his Collection, he falsified Daniel's Chronicle in numberless places. Yet this very man, in the preface to the first of these books, advanced a particular Fact to charge three eminent persons of falsifying the lord Clarendon's History; which fact has been disproved by Dr. Atterbury, late bishop of Rochester, then the only survivor of them; and the particular part , And Milo-like surveys his arms and hands;