Joseph Trapp

His production as a younger man of occasional verse (some anonymous, or in Latin) and dramas led to his appointment as the first Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1708.

As a poet, he was not well thought of by contemporaries, with Jonathan Swift refusing a dinner in an unavailing attempt to avoid revising one of Trapp’s poems, and Abel Evans making an epigram on his blank verse translation of the Aeneid with a reminder of the commandment against murder.

[1] Early in his academic career Trapp began to versify for Oxford collections; and he wrote poetical paraphrases and translations which are included in the Miscellanies of John Dryden and Elijah Fenton.

His lectures were delivered in Latin and showed originality, for example on ut pictura poesis;[4] but he was thought to have fawned too much on William Lancaster the vice-chancellor.

[1][8] From 1714 to 1722 he held by the gift of the Earl of Peterborough the rectory of Dauntsey in Wiltshire, and through the interest of William Lancaster he obtained in 1715 the lectureship at the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster.

The governors of St. Bartholomew's Hospital elected Trapp on 20 April 1722 as vicar of the united parishes of Christ Church, Newgate Street, and St. Leonard, Foster Lane, and in 1733 he was presented by Lord Bolingbroke to the rectory of Harlington in Middlesex.

[1] In the space of a few weeks in 1726 several Londoners became Catholic converts, and Trapp published a treatise of Popery truly stated and briefly confuted, in three parts, which reached a third edition in 1745.

[1] George Whitefield went to Christ Church, Newgate Street, on 29 April 1739, and heard Trapp preach against him one of four discourses on the nature, folly, sin, and danger of being righteous overmuch; they were printed in 1739.

Answers to them were published by Whitefield, William Law, Robert Seagrave, and others, and an anonymous reply bore the sarcastic title of Dr. Trapp vindicated from the Imputation of being a Christian.