Mr. Oldmixon wrote a history of the Stuarts in folio, and a Critical History of England, in two volumes octavo.  The former of these pieces was undertaken to blacken the family of the Stuarts.  The most impartial writers and candid critics, on both sides, have held this work in contempt, for in every page there breathes a malevolent spirit, a disposition to rail and calumniate:  So far from observing that neutrality and dispassionate evenness of temper, which should be carefully attended to by every historian, he suffers himself to be transported with anger:  He reviles, wrests particular passages and frequently draws forced conclusions.  A history written in this spirit has no great claim to a reader’s faith.  The reigns of the Stuarts in England were no doubt chequer’d with many evils; and yet it is certainly true, that a man who can fit deliberately down to search for errors only, must have a strong propension to calumny, or at least take delight in triumphing over the weakness of his fellow creatures, which is surely no indication of a good heart.

Mr. Oldmixon, being employ’d by bishop Kennet, in publishing the Historians in his collection, he perverted Daniel’s Chronicle in numberless places.  Yet this very man, in the preface to the first of these, advanced a particular fact, to charge three eminent persons of interpolating the lord Clarendon’s History, which fact has been disproved by the bishop of Rochester, Dr. Atterbury, then the only survivor of them; and the particular part he pretended to be falsifed produced since, after almost ninety years, in that noble author’s own hand.

He was all his life a virulent Party-Writer, and received his reward in a small part in the revenue at Liverpool, where he died in an advanced age, but in what year we cannot learn.

Mr. Oldmixon, besides the works we have mentioned, was author of a volume of Poems, published in 1714.

The Life of Arthur Maynwaring, Esq; prefixed to the works of that author, by Mr. Oldmixon.

England’s Historical Epistles (Drayton’s revived).

The Life of queen Anne.

[Footnote A:  See Jacob’s Lives of the Poets, p. 197.]

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Leonard Welsted, Esq;

This gentleman was descended from a very good family in Leicestershire, and received the rudiments of his education in Westminster school.  We are informed by major Cleland, author of a Panegyric on Mr. Pope, prefixed to the Dunciad, that he was a member of both the universities.

In a piece said to have been written by Mr. Welsted, called The Characters of the Times, printed in 8vo. 1728, he gives this account of himself; ’Mr. Welsted had in his youth raised so great expectations of his future genius, that there was a kind of struggle between the two universities, which should have the honour of his education; to compound this, he civilly became a member of both, and after having passed some