id="FNanchor_25"/>[25] This new titlepage, added early in December, reads as follows:

Langbaine's reaction to the trick is contained in the Advertisement in which he compares this incident to one played on Oldham and decries "the Heathenish Name of Momus Triumphans."

Macdonald believes this account is fictive and that Langbaine invented the story to cover an initial immodesty,[27] but Langbaine's style has nothing of the biting playfulness of tone of the spurious title. He is often righteous and sarcastic, but he is not given to direct immodesty or to the burlesque, and he does not consider plagiarism his principal subject. Further, there is evidence in the Preface ([A3r]) that "New Catalogue" was at least his working title.

Nevertheless, the false title page is a clever and perceptive joke on Langbaine's classical bias and on his fixation with plagiary. His predecessor Kirkman has given an apt contemporary definition of a momus:

If Langbaine was such a momus, he certainly dipped his feather into ink, "the common Remedy" against attack (the Advertisement), giving the lie to his enemies the Poets.

The third point of attack, that concerning the title of esquire, was perhaps intended as an insult to the humble origins of Langbaine's distinguished father and is certainly appropriate satire on a man so concerned with borrowing and on one who had left the university profligately to become "idle" and "a great jockey."[29] Langbaine was entitled to style himself a gentleman[30] as he does in A New Catalogue (but not in the Account); ironically, Langbaine came to the address of esquire by his elections in 1690 and 1691 as inferior and then superior beadle of arts of Oxford University "in consideration of his ingenuity and loss of part of his estate."[31]

Langbaine's reactions to the trick served to intensify his source studies (though this was already promised in the Preface) and to increase his attention and antagonism to Dryden. Moreover, in the Account he added titles very carefully, including that of esquire to Dryden himself. This particular response to his satirists reaches its most amusing dimension with the preciseness of the unknown author listing of "R. A. Gent." (Account, p. 516).

It is probably impossible ever to know if Dryden was involved in the trick played on Langbaine, and it is hard to imagine that Langbaine's criticisms would have engaged even so ardent a controversialist as Dryden, but whether the emotion is in any way mutual or not, Dryden is at the center of Langbaine's thoughts:

What is finally remarkable about Langbaine's work, especially in the Preface to Momus and throughout the Account, is his abiding determination to insert himself into virtually every one of Dryden's quarrels, no matter how passe. The quality which binds together Langbaine's heros is not their talent, their common beliefs or their rectitude in admitting sources, but their mutual fortunes in being Dryden's adversaries. The list of support he marshals is a long one and includes Sir Robert Howard and the debate over the rhymed heroic drama; the group led by Clifford and known as the Rota;[32] The Empress of Morocco controversy with Settle;[33] Shadwell, Flecknoe and Mac Flecknoe; the Ancients versus the Moderns; Rymer; and Dryden's attitudes toward the classics, the French, and the English dramatists of the earlier part of the century. The reiterations of these attacks come from Langbaine at a time when Dryden was vulnerable to political and religious charges, and Langbaine does not fail to include those.