Note 1105 — APPENDICES

Of Whitfield (or Whitfeld, as some write) I have found nothing but that he wrote some Latin verses on William the Third. The second volume of William Hawkins’s Tracts (1758) contains, besides a ridiculous tragedy, Henry and Rosamond, an Essay on Drama, principally occupied by carpings at Mason’s Elfrida, and some Letters on Pope’s Commentary on Homer—very small critical beer. About Wheeler I find less even than about Whitfield. The piety of his son published—long after date and in our own times—1870—the Prælections of John Randolph, a man who, besides holding several other professorships at Oxford, attained to eminence in the Church, and died Bishop of London in 1813. They are very sober and respectable. There is in poetry a non contemnenda proprietas quod imitando præcipiat; and the warning, non aliunde artis suæ rudimenta desumet Criticus nisi ex sanæ Logices præceptis, might with advantage have been observed oftener than it has been. But Randolph sticks in the bark and the letter. Holmes, a poet after a fashion, a theologian, and what not, seems to have written more freely on anything than on criticism.