Such engagements left him little time for literary creativity in the years before his death in 1747. However, Trapp finally finished his labors on Virgil by issuing a translation of the works (1731); and his poem _Thoughts Upon the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell_ (1734-35) shows him attempting to combine literary pleasure with theological instruction--a potent mixture forcibly administered to his parishoners, for it is recorded that he desired in his will that a copy be presented to each "housekeeper" among them. _The Paradisus Amissus, Latine Redditus_ appeared in 1741-44. This translation of Milton into Latin is more than a freak of the neoclassical mind. It is the natural complement to his earlier translation of the _Aeneid_ into Miltonic blank verse as well as his attempt to judge the classic sublime by the achievement of the masterwork of Christian epic, a task that had preoccupied him as Oxford's Professor of Poetry.
The importance of Trapp's Preface to his version of the _Aeneid_ (and the extensive notes to the text) lies fundamentally in the fusion of Miltonic example with neoclassical precept in an attempt both to understand the Latin text rationally and to communicate the intensely exciting and moving experience that the _Aeneid_ evokes. This was a new departure. French Aristotelian criticism of classical epic was (inevitably) not influenced by Milton. In the English tradition, neither Dryden in his Dedication of the _Aeneid_ nor Pope in the prefatory material to the _Iliad_ (with which Trapp frequently takes issue) used _Paradise Lost_ as the basic touchstone of value. Trapp was to be sneered at in Delany's "News from Parnassus" for claiming in Pythagorean vein that the spirit of Milton had descended to him. This was unfair; he made no such claim. Trapp was trying to discover affinities between past and present in poetic sensibility and in the use of language. In doing so, he sought to place a major English poet in relation to Virgil, and he judged from this example that the English blank verse line had more of the grandeur of the Latin hexameter than the couplet in the hands even of Dryden or Pope. His taste told him that the imaginative invention and force of Milton had more of the Virgilian spirit than the elegant correctness of English Augustanism. He argues his position with vigor in the Preface and in his notes, and often with illustrative example.