Arthur Mainwaring (_The life and posthumous works of Arthur Maynwaring,
Esq._ [London, 1715], p. 324; this is the source of most of our
knowledge of Mainwaring.). The identity of Mainwaring's collaborators is
a matter of conjecture. Perhaps the most eligible are those who assisted
with the _Medley_, as Steele, Anthony Henley, and White Kennett. Among
other possibilities are such active Whig writers as Thomas Burnet and
George Duckett; and even Oldmixon cannot be ruled out. Doubtless
Mainwaring was the inspiring spirit--of this as well as other attacks
on the group surrounding Harley. Poet, ardent Jacobite convert to
Whiggism, member of the Kit Kat Club, member of Parliament, and Auditor
of the Imprest, Mainwaring had a brief but full career. It included a
part in the _Whig Examiner_ and chief responsibility for the _Medley_.
In the course of his political opposition he appears to have developed a
genuine hatred of Swift, to whom he always referred, if Oldmixon's word
can be trusted, as "one of the wickedest Wretches alive." By May, 1712,
when _The British Academy_ was published, he was already ill of the
disease which ended in his death a few months later; but he seems to
have retained his vigor and his clear intelligence to the end. _The
British Academy_ is shrewdly conceived to cast odium on Swift's proposal
for an Academy by identifying its potential members as a Tory faction
and the whole project as merely a scheme to provide Harley with a set of
pensioners who would be obliged in gratitude "to revere his Virtue and
his Memory." Whereas in the _Reflections_ Swift is assaulted with hard
obvious blows, in _The British Academy_ a more subtle intelligence is
evident: the attack is oblique and ironic, and a tone of Addisonian
urbanity is fairly well maintained. Nevertheless it is not as literature
that these two answers to Swift are to be judged. They are minor, though
interesting, documents in political warfare which cut athwart a
significant cultural controversy.

-- Louis A. Landa
Princeton University

John Oldmixon's _Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley_ (1712) is
reproduced here, with permission, from the copy owned by the University
of Chicago Library; Mainwaring's _British Academy_ (1712) is reproduced
here, with permission, from the copy owned by the Newberry Library,
Chicago.

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REFLECTIONS