Joseph Trapp

Joseph Trapp (1679 – 1747) was an English clergyman, academic, poet and pamphleteer.

• Arms and the man I sing who first from Troy
  Came to the Italian and Lavinian shores,
  Exiled by fate; much tossed on land and sea
  By power divine and cruel Juno's rage;
  Much too in war he suffered, till he reared
  A city and to Latium brought his gods:
  Whence sprung the Latin progeny, the kings
  Of Alba, and the walls of towering Rome.
  • The Æneis of Virgil (1718)

• His book may continue its existence as long as it is the clandestine refuge of schoolboys.
  • Samuel Johnson on Trapp's translation of Virgil, in Lives of the English Poets (1781), 'The Life of Dryden'.

• Better than Virgil? Yes—perhaps—
  But then, by Jove, 'tis Dr. Trapp's!
  • "Epigram of a contemporary wit, on being told that a certain nobleman wrote verses which were better than Virgil", as reported and quoted in Blackwood's Magazine, Vol. CI (January 1867), p. 37.

• Encyclopedic article on Joseph Trapp on Wikipedia