, ridiculed in the Taller by the name of Mr. Omicron, “the Unborn Poet,”
, ridiculed in the Taller by the
name of Mr. Omicron, “the Unborn Poet,
” descended
from an ancient family of the name, originally seated at
Oldmixon, near Bridgewater, in Somersetshire, and was
born in 1673. Where he was educated is not known. He
appears to have been early a writer for the stage; his first
production was “Amyntas,
” a pastoral, and his second,
in 1700, an opera, neither of much merit or success. He
Soon, however, became a violent party-writer, and a severe and malevolent critic. In the former light he was a
strong opponent of the Stuart family, whom he has, on
every occasion, endeavoured to vilify without any regard
to that impartiality which ought ever to be the essential
characteristic of an historian. As a critic he was perpetually attacking, with evident tokens of envy and malevolence, his several contemporaries; particularly Addison,
Eusden, and Pope. The last of these, however, whom he
had attacked in different letters which he wrote in “The
Flying Post,
” and repeatedly reflected on in his “Prose
essays on Criticism,
” and in his “Art of Logic and Rhetoric,
” written in imitation of Bouhours, has introduced
him into his “Dunciad,
” with some very distinguishing
marks of eminence among the devotees of dulness. In the
second book of that severe poem, where the dunces are
contending for the prize of dulness, by diving in the mud
of Fleet-ditch, he represents our author as mounting the
sides of a lighter, in order to enable him to take a more
efficacious plunge. Oldmixon’s malevolence of abuse entitled him to the above-mentioned honour; and, to the
disgrace of the statesmen of that time, his zeal as a virulent party-writer procured him the place of collector of
the customs at the port of Bridgewater, but he died at his
house in Great Pulteney-street, aged sixty-nine, July 9,
1742. He left a daughter, who died in 1789, at Newiand
in Gloucestershire, aged eighty-four. Another of his
daughters sung at Hickford’s rooms in 1746. He lies
buried in Ealing church.