Page:The lives of the poets of Great Britain and Ireland to the time of Dean Swift - Volume 4.djvu/204

194 formidable both in power and keenneſs. In his Dunciad, Book I. Line 101. where he repreſents Dulneſs taking a view of her ſons, he ſays

Mr. Oldmixon likewiſe in his Art of Logic and Rhetoric, page 413, affirms, ‘That of all the Galimatias he ever met with, none comes up to ſome verſes of this poet, which have as much of the ridiculum and the fuſtian in them, as can well be jumbled together, and are of that ſort of nonſenſe, which ſo perfectly confounds all ideas, that there is no diſtinct one left in the mind. Further he ſays of him, that he hath propheſy’d his own poetry ſhall be ſweeter than Catullus, Ovid and Tibullus; but we have little hope of the accompliſhment of it from what he hath lately publiſhed.’ Upon which Mr. Oldmixon has not ſpared a reflexion, that the placing the laurel on the head of one who wrote ſuch verſes, will give poſterity a very lively idea of the juſtice and judgment of thoſe who bellowed it.

Mr. Oldmixon no doubt by this reflexion inſinuates, that the laurel would have better become his own brows than Euſden’s; but it would perhaps have been more decent for him to acquieſce in the opinion of the duke of Buckingham (Sheffield) who in his Seſſion of the Poets thus mentions Euſden. The