spised; nor should his dignity of mind be without its praise, had he not paid the homage to greatness which he denied to genius, and degraded himself by conferring that authority over the national taste which he takes from the poets, upon men of high rank and wide influence, but of less wit and not greater virtue. Here is again discovered the inhabitant of Cheapside, whose head cannot keep his poetry unmingled with trade. To hinder that intellectual bankruptcy which he affects to fear, he will erect a Bank for Wit. In this poem he justly censured Dryden's impurities, but praised his powers; though in a subsequent edition he retained the satire, and omitted the praise. What was his reason, I know not; Dryden was then no longer in his way. His head still teemed with heroic poetry; and (1705) he published Eliza,' in ten books. I am afraid that the world was now weary of contending abont Blackmore's heroes; for I do not remember that by any author, serious or comical, I have found Eliza either praised or blamed. She "dropped," as it seems, "dead-born from the press." ." It is never mentioned, and was never seen by me till I borrowed it for the present occasion. Jacob says, "it is corrected and revised for another impression;" but the labour of revision was thrown away. From this time he turned some of his thoughts to the celebration of living characters; and wrote a poem on the Kitcat Club, and Advice to the Poets how to celebrate the Duke of Marlborough; but, on occasion of another year of success, thinking himself qualified to give more instruction, he again wrote a poem of Advice to a Weaver of Tapestry. Steele was then publishing the Tatler;' and, looking round him for something at which he might laugh, unluckily lighted on Sir Richard's work, and treated it with such contempt, that, as Fenton observes, he put an end to the species of writers that gave Advice to Painters. Not long after (1712) he published Creation, a philosophical Poem,' which has been by my recommendation inserted in the late collection. Whoever judges of this by any other of Blackmore's performances, will do it injury. The praise given it by Addison (Spec. 339) is too well known to be transcribed; but some notice is due to the testimony of Dennis, who calls it a "philosophical Poem, which has equalled that of Lucretius in the beauty of its versification, and infinitely surpassed it in the solidity and strength of its reasoning." Why an author surpasses himself, it is natural to inquire. I have heard from Mr. Draper, an eminent bookseller, an account received by him from Ambrose Philips, "That Blackmore, as he proceeded in this poem, laid his manuscript from time to time before a club of wits with whom he associated; and that every man contributed, as he could, either improvement or correction; so that," said Philips," there are perhaps no where in the book thirty lines together that now stand as they were originally written." The relation of Philips, I suppose, was true; but when all reasonable, all credible allowance is made for this friendly revision, the author will still retain an ample dividend of praise; for to him must always be assigned the plan of the work, the distribution of its parts, the choice of topics, the train of argument, and, what is yet more, the general predominance of philosophical judgment and poetical spirit. Correction seldom effects more than the suppression of faults: a happy line, or a single elegance, may perhaps be added; but of a large work the general character must always remain; the original constitution can be very little helped by local remedies; inherent and radical dullness will never be much invigorated by extrinsic animation. This poem, if he had written nothing else, would have transmitted him to posterity among the first favourites of the English Muse; but to make verses was his transcendent pleasure, and, as he was not deterred by censure, he was not satiated by praise. He deviated, however, sometimes into other tracks of literature, and condescended to entertain his readers with plain prose. When the Spectator' stopped, he considered the polite world as destitute of entertainment; and, in concert with Mr. Hughes, who wrote every third paper, published three times a week the Lay Monastery,' founded on the supposition that some literary men, whose characters are described, had retired to a house in the country to enjoy philosophical leisure, and resolved to instruct the public, by communicating their disquisitions and amusements. Whether any real persons were concealed under fictitious names, is not known. The hero of the club is one Mr. Johnson; such a constellation of excellence, that his character shall not be suppressed, though there is no great genius in the design, nor skill in the delineation. "The first I shall name is Mr. Johnson, a gentleman that owes to Nature excellent faculties and an elevated genius, and to industry and application many acquired accomplishments. His taste is distinguishing, just, and delicate: his it, yet he has sometimes entertained his friends with his unpublished performances." The rest of the Lay Monks seem to be but feeble mortals, in comparison with the gigantic Johnson; who yet, with all his abilities, and the help of the fraternity, could drive the publication but to forty papers, which were afterwards collected into a volume, and called in the title A Sequel to the Spectators. Some years afterwards (1716 and 1717) he published two volumes of Essays in prose, which can be commended only as they are written for the highest and noblest purpose, the promotion of religion. Blackmore's prose is not the prose of a poet; for it is languid, sluggish, and lifeless; his diction is neither daring nor exact, his flow neither rapid nor easy, and his periods neither smooth nor strong. His account of Wit will show with how little clearness he is content to think, and how little his thoughts are recommended by his language. judgment clear, and his reason strong, accompanied with an imagination full of spirit, of great compass, and stored with refined ideas. He is a critic of the first rank; and, what is his peculiar ornament, he is delivered from the ostentation, malevolence, and supercilious temper, that so often blemish men of that character. His remarks result from the nature and reason of things, and are formed by a judgment free, and unbiased by the authority of those who have lazily followed each other in the same beaten tract of thinking, and are arrived only at the reputation of acute grammarians and commentators; men, who have been copying one another many hundred years, without any improvement; or, if they have ventured farther, have only applied in a mechanical manner the rules of ancient critics to modern writings, and with great labour discovered nothing but their own want of judgment and capacity. As Mr. Johnson penetrates to the bottom of his subject, by which means his observations "As to its efficient cause, Wit owes are solid and natural, as well as delicate, its production to an extraordinary and so his design is always to bring to light peculiar temperament in the constitution something useful and ornamental; whence of the possessor of it, in which is found his character is the reverse to theirs, who a concurrence of regular and exalted ferhave eminent abilities in insignificant ments, and an affluence of animal spirits, knowledge, and a great felicity in find refined and rectified to a great degree of ing out trifles. He is no less industrious purity; whence, being endowed with to search out the merit of an author, than vivacity, brightness, and celerity, as well sagacious in discerning his errors and in their reflections as direct motions, defects; and takes more pleasure in com- they become proper instruments for the mending the beauties, than exposing the sprightly operations of the mind; by blemishes of a laudable writing: like which means the imagination can with Horace, in a long work, he can bear great facility range the wide field of Nasome deformities, and justly lay them on ture, contemplate an infinite variety of the imperfection of human nature, which objects, and, by observing the similitude is incapable of faultless productions. and disagreement of their several qualiWhen an excellent Drama appears in ties, single out and abstract, and then suit public, and by its intrinsic worth attracts and unite, those ideas which will best a general applause, he is not stung with serve its purpose. Hence beautiful alluenvy and spleen; nor does he express sions, surprising metaphors, and admira savage nature, in fastening upon the able sentiments, are always ready at celebrated author, dwelling upon his hand and while the fancy is full of imaginary defects, and passing over his images, collected from innumerable obconspicuous excellences. He treats all jects and their different qualities, relawriters upon the same impartial footing; tions, and habitudes, it can at pleasure and is not, like the little critics, taken up dress a common notion in a strange but entirely in finding out only the beauties becoming garb; by which, as before obof the ancient, and nothing but the errors served, the same thought will appear a of the modern writers. Never did any new one, to the great delight and wonder one express more kindness and good na- of the hearer. What we call Genius ture to young and unfinished authors; he results from this particular happy compromotes their interests, protects their plexion in the first formation of the perreputation, extenuates their faults, and son that enjoys it, and is Nature's gift, sets off their virtues, and by his candour but diversified by various specific chaguards them from the severity of his racters and limitations, as its active fire judgment. He is not like those dry is blended and allayed by different procritics, who are morose because they portions of phlegm, or reduced and regucannot write themselves, but is him-lated by the contrast of opposite ferments. self master of a good vein in poetry; and though he does not often employ Therefore, as there happens in the composition of a facetious genius a greater or Р less, though still an inferior, degree of judgment and prudence, one man of wit will be varied and distinguished from another." pressed, than could be expected from the common tenor of his prose: "As the several combinations of splenetic madness and folly produce an infinite variety of irregular understand In these Essays he took little care to propitiate the wits; for he scorns to averting, so the amicable accommodation and their malice at the expense of virtue or of truth. "Several, in their books, have many sarcastical and spiteful strokes at religion in general; while others make themselves pleasant with the principles of the Christian. Of the last kind, this age has seen a most audacious example in the book intitled A Tale of a Tub. Had this writing been published in a Pagan or Popish nation, who are justly impatient of all indignity offered to the established religion of their country, no doubt but the author would have received the punishment he deserved. But the fate of this impious buffoon is very different; for in a Protestant kingdom, zealous of their civil and religious immunities, he has not only escaped affronts and the effects of public resentiment, but has been caressed and patronised by persons of great figure, and of all denominations. Violent party men, who differed in all things besides, agreed in their turn to show particular respect and friendship to this insolent derider of the worship of his country, till at last the reputed writer is not only gone off with impunity, but triumphs in his dignity and preferment. I do not know that any inquiry or search was ever made after this writing, or that any reward was ever offered for the discovery of the author, or that the infamous book was ever condemned to be burned in public: whether this proceeds from the excessive esteem and love that men in power, during the late reign, had for wit, or their defect of zeal and concern for the Christian religion, will be determined best by those who are best acquainted with their character." alliance between several virtues and vices produce an equal diversity in the dispositions and manners of mankind; whence it comes to pass, that as many monstrous and absurd productions are found in the moral as in the intellectual world. How surprising is it to observe, among the least culpable men, some whose minds are attracted by Heaven and Earth with a seeming equal force; some who are proud of humility; others who are censorious and uncharitable, yet self-denying and devout; some who join contempt of the world with sordid avarice; and others who preserve a great degree of piety, with ill nature and ungoverned passions! Nor are instances of this inconsistent mixture less frequent among bad men, where we often, with admiration, see persons at once generous and unjust, impious lovers of their coun, try, and flagitious heroes, good natured sharpers, immoral men of honour, and libertines who will sooner die than change their religion; and though it is true that repugnant coalitions of so high a degree are found but in a part of mankind, yet none of the whole mass, either good or bad, are entirely exempted from some absurd mixture." He about this time (Aug. 22, 1716) became one of the Elects of the College of Physicians; and was soon after (Oct. 1) chosen Censor. He seems to have arrived late, whatever was the reason, at his medical honours. Having succeeded so well in his book on Creation, by which he established the great principle of all Religion, he thought his undertaking imperfect, unless he likewise enforced the truth of Revebe-lation; and for that purpose added another poem on Redemption. He had likewise written, before his Creation, three books on the Nature of Man. In another place he speaks with coming abhorrence of a godless author, who has burlesqued a Psalm. This author was supposed to be Pope, who published a reward for any one that would produce the coiner of the accusation, but never denied it; and was afterwards the perpetual and incessant enemy of Blackmore. One of his Essays is upon the Spleen, which is treated by him so much to his own satisfaction, that he has published the same thoughts in the same words; first in the Lay Monastery;' then in the Essay; and then in the Preface to a Medical Treatise on the Spleen. One passage, which I have found already twice, I will here exhibit, because I think it better imagined, and better ex The lovers of musical devotion have always wished for a more happy metrical version than they have yet obtained of the book of Psalms: this wish the piety of Blackmore led him to gratify; and he produced (1721) A new Version of the Psalms of David, fitted to the Tunes used in Churches;' which, being recommended by the archbishops and many bishops, obtained a licence for its admission into public worship; but no admission has it yet obtained, nor has it any right to come where Brady and Tate have got possession. Blackmore's name must be added to those of many others, who, by the same attempt, have obtained only the praise of meaning well. He was not yet deterred from heroic poetry. There was another monarch of this island (for he did not fetch his heroes from foreign countries), whom he considered as worthy of the Epic Muse; and he dignified Alfred (1723) with twelve books. But the opinion of the nation was now settled; a hero introduced by Blackmore was not likely to find either respect or kindness; Alfred took his place by Eliza, in silence and darkness: Benevolence was ashamed to favour, and Malice was weary of insulting. Of his four Epic Poems, the first had such reputation and popularity as enraged the critics; the second was at least known enough to be ridiculed; the two last had neither friends nor enemies. Contempt is a kind of gangrene, which, if it seizes one part of a character, corrupts all the rest by degrees. Blackmore, being despised as a poet, was in time neglected as a physician; his practice, which was once invidiously great, forsook him in the latter part of his life; but being by nature, or by principle, averse from idleness, he employed his unwelcome leisure in writing books on physic, and teaching others to cure those whom he could himself cure no longer. I know not whether I can enumerate all the treatises by which he has endeavoured to diffuse the art of healing; for there is scarcely any distemper, of dreadful name, which he has not taught the reader how to oppose. He has written on the smallpox, with a vehement invective against inoculation; on consumptions, the spleen, the gout, the rheumatisin, the king's evil, the dropsy, the jaundice, the stone, the diabetes, and the plague. Of those books, if I had read them, it could not be expected that I should be able to give a critical account. I have been told that there is something in them of vexation and discontent, discovered by a perpetual attempt to degrade physic from its sublimity, and to represent it as attainable without much previous or concomitant learning. By the transient glances which I have thrown upon them, I have observed an affected contempt of the Ancients, and a supercilious derision of transmitted knowledge. Of this indecent arrogance the following quotation from his Preface to the Treatise on the Small-pox will afford a specimen; in which, when the reader finds, what I fear is true, that, when he was censuring Hippocrates, he did not know the difference between aphorism and apophthegm, he will not pay much regard to his determinations concerning ancient learning. "As for his book of Aphorisms, it is like my lord Bacon's of the same title, a book of jests, or a grave collection of trite and trifling observations; of which though many are true and certain, yet they signify nothing, and may afford diversion, but no instruction; most of them being much inferior to the sayings of the wise men of Greece, which yet are so low and mean, that we are entertained every day with more valuable sentiments at the table conversation of ingenious and learned men." I am unwilling, however, to leave him in total disgrace, and will therefore quote from another Preface a passage less reprehensible. "Some gentlemen have been disingenuous and unjust to me, by wresting and forcing my meaning, in the Preface to another book, as if I condemned and exposed all learning, though they knew I declared that I greatly honoured and esteemed all men of superior literature and erudition; and that I only undervalued false or superficial learning, that signifies nothing for the service of mankind; and that as to physic, I expressly affirmed that learning must be joined with native genius to make a physician of the first rank; but if those talents are separated, I asserted, and do still insist, that a man of native sagacity and dili gence will prove a more able and useful practiser, than a heavy notional scholar, encumbered with a heap of confused ideas." He was not only a poet and a physician, but produced likewise a work of a different kind, A true and impartial History of the Conspiracy against King William, of glorious Memory, in the Year 1695.' This I have never seen, but suppose it at least compiled with integ rity. He engaged likewise in theological controversy, and wrote two books against the Arians; Just Prejudices against the Arian Hypothesis;' and Modern Arians unmasked.' Another of his works is Natural Theology; or, Moral Duties considered apart from Positive; with some Observations on the Desirableness and Necessity of a supernatural Revelation.' This was the last book that he published. He left behind him The accomplished Preacher, or an Essay upon Divine Eloquence; which was printed after his death by Mr. White of Nayland, in Essex, the minister who attended his deathbed, and testified the fervent piety of his last hours. He died on the eighth of October, 1729. Blackmore, by the unremitted enmity of the wits, whom he provoked more by his virtue than his dulness, has been exposed to worse treatment than he de Its two constituent parts are ratiocination and description. To reason in verse, is allowed to be difficult; but Blackmore not only reasons in verse, but very often reasons poetically; and finds the art of uniting ornament with strength, and ease with closeness. This is a skill which Pope might have condescended to learn from him, when he needed it so much in his Moral Essays. served. His name was so long used to point every epigram upon dull writers, that it became at last a by-word of contempt: but it deserves observation, that malignity takes hold only of his writings, and that his life passed without reproach, even when his boldness of reprehension naturally turned upon him many eyes desirous to espy faults, which many tongues would have made haste to publish. But those who could not blame could at least forbear to praise, and therefore of his private life and domestic character there are no memorials. As an author, he may justly claim the honours of magnanimity. The incessant attacks of his enemies, whether serious or merry, are never discovered to have disturbed his quiet, or to have lessened his confidence in himself: they neither awed him to silence nor to caution; they neither provoked him to petulance, nor depressed him to complaint. While the distributors of literary fame were endeavouring to depreciate and degrade him, he either despised or defied them, wrote on as he had written before, and never turned aside to quiet them by civility, or repress them by confutation. He depended with great security on his own powers, and perhaps was for that reason less diligent in perusing books. His literature was, I think, but small. What he knew of antiquity, I suspect him to have gathered from modern compilers: but, though he could not boast of much critical knowledge, his mind was stored with general principles, and he left minute researches to those whom he considered as little minds., With this disposition he wrote most of his poems. Having formed a magnificent design, he was careless of particular and subordinate elegances; he studied no niceties of versification; he waited for no felicities of fancy; but caught his first thoughts in the first words in which they were presented: nor does it appear that he saw beyond his own performances, or had ever elevated his views to that ideal perfection which every genius born to excel is condemned always to pursue, and never overtake. In the first suggestions of his imagination he acquiesced; he thought them good, and did not seek for better. His works may be read a long time without the occurrence of a single line that stands prominent from the rest. The poem on Creation' has, however, the appearance of more circumspection; it wants neither harmony of numbers, accuracy of thought, nor elegance of diction: it has either been written with great care, or, what cannot be imagined of so long a work, with such felicity as made care less necessary. In his descriptions both of life and nature, the poet and the philosopher happily cooperate; truth is recommended by elegance, and elegance sustained by truth. In the structure and order of the poem, not only the greater parts are properly consecutive, but the didactic and illustrative paragraphs are so happily mingled, that labour is relieved by pleasure, and the attention is led on through a long succession of varied excellence to the original position, the fundamental principle of wisdom and of virtue. As the heroic poems of Blackmore are now little read, it is thought proper to insert, as a specimen from Prince Arthur,' the song of Mopas mentioned by Molineux. But that which Arthur with most pleasure heard Were noble strains, by Mopas sung, the bard, Then sung the bard how the light vapours rise skies: From the warm earth, and cloud the smiling real plain, sound Fall from their crystal quarries to the ground; How some are laid in trains, that kindled fly, In harmless fires by night, about the sky; |