an English hack writer who was, by turns, a translator, biographer, essayist, playwright, poet, author of fictional letters, fabulist, short story author, and critic. He provided the source for many lives of Restoration figures, although he appears to have propagated or invented numerous errors with them. He is remembered best as a target of Alexander Pope's in both Dunciad and the Epistle to Dr. John Arbuthnot and an enemy of Jonathan Swift's. Gildon's biographies are, in many cases, the only biographies available, but they have nearly without exception been shown to have wholesale invention in them.
