and a starving wife. Gildon edited the Works of Charles Blount in 1693 and added his own Deist tract, Oracles of Reason, to the edition. In 1695, he produced a Life of Blount that made his subject heroic. At the same time, he wrote a defense of Dryden's modernism against Thomas Rymer in 1694. Between 1696 and 1702, Gildon wrote four blank verse tragedies that failed. He also converted to Anglicanism in 1698 and wrote, later, The Deist's Manual (1705), to attack Deism. He also produced a series of tales, including "The Post-Boy Robb'd of his Mail", "The Golden Spy," and "All for the Better" between 1692 and 1720. Gildon's The Golden Spy (1709) has been regarded by modern scholars as "the first, fully-fledged it-narrative in English". But for his contemporaries, it tends to be read as "a Menippean satire, a re-adaptation of Apuleius's The Golden Ass and a sequel to The New Metamorphosis [i.e. Gildon's adaptation of The Golden Ass in 1708]". In 1706, Gildon, a staunch Whig by this point (in contrast to his family's Toryism and Jacobitism), published letters to the Electress Sophia to come visit England, with an eye toward being on hand to take the throne upon Queen Anne's death. The government prosecuted him for seditious libel. Prominent Whigs came to his aid, and Richard Steele wrote his appeal. When Gildon was found guilty and fined 100 pounds, Arthur Mainwaring paid the fine for him. The letters were sufficient provocation to carry a prison term or the pillory, but Gildon's connections saved him. Arthur Mainwaring, an enemy already of Jonathan Swift's, aided Gildon again, and Steele introduced him to other periodical work. Gildon's 1710 Life of Thomas Betterton was dedicated to Steele in return. Gildon's essay on "The Art of Poetry" was published anonymously in John Brightland's A Grammar of the English Tongue, which was first published in 1711; Gildon later expanded this essay into his book The Complete Art of Poetry in 1718. Brightland's Grammar also included Gildon's treatise on "Logic; or, The Art of Reasoning". Gildon's "Logic" is an unattributed translation of a large part of Jean Le Clerc's Logica of 1692. Much of Gildon's translation of Le Clerc was appropriated by Ephraim Chambers when Chambers composed his Cyclopaedia. In 1711, John Brightland hired Gildon to run The British Mercury. For six months, Gildon conducted a series of attacks on Jonathan Swift and