made Trap chaplain to Lord Bolingbroke, and he is mighty happy and thankful for it' (Works, iii. 41). Next November he was an unsuccessful candidate for the lectureship at St. Clement Danes, London. On 1 April 1713 Swift would not dine with Bolingbroke because he was expected to 'look over a dull poem of one parson Trap upon the peace;' afterwards he both read and corrected the poem, 'but it was good for nothing.' It was printed anonymously at Dublin, as 'Peace, a Poem,' inscribed to the Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 1713; it was praised by Gay as 'containing a great many good lines.' In February 1713–1714 a case which had been several times before the courts was decided in his favour. He had contested with another clergyman the lectureship of the London parishes of St. Olave, Old Jewry, and St. Martin's, Ironmonger Lane, and through the votes of the parishioners that were dissenters had lost it. It was now decided that they had not the privilege of voting, and this decision gave him the post (Malcolm, Lond. Redivieum, iv. 562). 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 his old friend Dr. Lancaster he obtained in 1715 the lectureship at the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster. He dedicated to his parishioners at Dauntsey a tract on the 'Duties of Private, Domestic, and Public Devotion.' 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 1732–3 he was presented by Lord Bolingbroke to the rectory of Harlington in Middlesex. These preferments he retained until his death, and with them he held lectureships in several London churches, the most important of them being St. Olave, Old Jewry, and St. Martin-in-the-Fields. 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, passed through four editions in that year, and were translated into German at Basle in 1769. Answers to them were published by Whitefield, Law, the Rev. Robert Seagrave, and others, and an anonymous reply bore the sarcastic title of 'Dr. Trapp vindicated from the Imputation of being a Christian' (cf. Overton, John Law, pp. 293–308). He retorted with 'The True Spirit of the Methodists and their Allies: in Answer to six out of the seven Pamphlets against Dr Trapp's Sermons' (anon.), 1740. A long extract from Trapp's sermon was printed in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' (1739, pp. 288–292), and a continuation was promised, but not permitted to appear (a paper of 'Considerations ' on its non-appearance was printed in that periodical for 1787, ii. 557, as by Dr. Johnson).
In the space of a few weeks in 1726 several persons living in London were received into the Roman church, and Trapp thereupon published a treatise of 'Popery truly stated and briefly confuted,' in three parts, which reached a third edition in 1745. In 1727 he renewed the attack in 'The Church of England defended against the Church of Rome, in Answer to a late Sophistical and Insolent Popish Book.' As a compliment for these labours he was created by the university of Oxford D.D. by diploma on 1 Feb. 1727–8.
The second half of Trapp's life passed in affluence and dignity. While president of Sion College in 1743 he published a 'Concio ad clerum Londinensem, 26 April 1743.' He died of pleurisy at Harlington on 22 Nov. 1747, and was buried on the north side of the entrance into the chancel, upon the north wall of which is a monument; another, the cost of which was borne by the parishioners, is on the east wall of the chancel of Newgate church. The books in Trapp's library at Warwick Lane, London, to which Sacheverell's library had been added, and those at Harlington, with his son's collections, were sold to Lowndes of London, and then passed to Governor Palk.
Trapp's eldest son, Henry, so named after Henry St. John, lord Bolingbroke, died in infancy. The second son, Joseph, rector of Strathfieldsaye, died in 1769; a poem by him on 'Virgil's Tomb, Naples,' 1741, is in Dodsley's 'Collection of Poems ' (iv. 110); in 1755 he gave to the picture gallery of the Bodleian Library an admirable three-quarter-length portrait of his father. An engraving of it was prefixed to vol. i. of the father's sermons (1752), and a second engraving is in Harding's 'Biographical Mirror' (ii. 84). A copy by Joseph Smith hangs in the hall of Wadham College.
Trapp was a man of striking appearance, and he was effective in the pulpit as an inculcator of plain morality. The assertion that he wasted his youthful energies in dissipation has to be accommodated to Bishop Pearce's statement that he studied harder than any man in England.
The best remembered of Trapp's works is his translation into blank verse of Virgil,
