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.