Pursuing the moral and religious path he had marked out for himself, Blackmore in 1700 produced a Paraphrase of the Book of Job and a Satire against Wit, in the latter of which he severely attacked Dryden, whose offences against morality on the stage he had previously assailed in the preface to Prince Arthur. Dryden replied by a contemptuous allusion to Blackmore in the prologue to The Pilgrim, acted shortly before his own death. In 1705 appeared Eliza, an epic in ten books, of which Johnson says: "I am afraid that the world was now weary of contending about 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.'' The exploits of Marlborough in 1706 naturally aroused Blackmore's enthusiasm; but he confined himself to advising others how to celebrate them adequately in verse and other kinds of art. One of his nostrums, Instructions to Vanderbank (1709), a weaver of tapestry, provoked the merriment of Steele in The Tatler. Creation, his best poem, appeared in 1712, and was extravagantly praised in The Spectator? When that paper and The Guardian came to an end, Blackmore, thinking that the public ought not to be left without instruction, edified them in a periodical called The Lay Monk, which he carried on with the help of Hughes through forty numbers, from 16th November 1713 to 15th February 1714. In 1716-17 he published some volumes of Essays, in which he attacked Swift, as the writer of A Tale of a Tub, and Pope, as "a godless author who has burlesqued a Psalm": it must be added, however, that in neither case was Blackmore the first aggressor. His effusion of verse was not even yet exhausted, for in 1721 he produced a Version of the Psalms of David fitted to the Tunes used in Churches; in 1722, a religious poem called Redemption; and, in 1723, yet another Epic entitled Alfred. He had now arrived at an age when practice often deserts even attentive physicians, and when it is natural 1 Tatler, No. 3. 2 Spectator, No. 339. that it should desert one whose attention was so much given as Blackmore's to other things. His patients left him as well as his readers: in his latter years, therefore, he turned to the theory of medicine, and, to adopt Johnson's humorous phrase, occupied himself with "teaching others to cure those whom he himself could cure no longer." He also wrote a book on Natural Theology, which was his last work before his death on the 8th of October 1729. Johnson, in his Life, says of him most justly that, as a poet, Blackmore has received "worse treatment than he deserves." For his epic poetry indeed there is little to be said. He has not the faintest perception of the meaning of the word "sublime"; and his studied imitation of splendid passages in Virgil, Tasso, and Milton, uniformly leaves a sense of the ridiculous. No poet, with any humour in his genius, could possibly have produced such lines as the following: Ætna, Vesuvius, and the fiery kind, Their flames within blown up with stormy wind, It may well be supposed from this example that the author of the Treatise on the Bathos found a happy hunting-ground in Blackmore's epics. I am bound to add, besides, that Blackmore, in his acknowledgment of obligations, is not quite honest. He confesses his debt to Virgil, for that was too obvious to be denied. He modelled his epic closely after the Latin poet, endeavouring to adapt the entire scheme of narrative in the Eneid to a Christian plot. Having shown how Prince Arthur was wrecked on the coast of Brittany by a storm, which Lucifer and Thor1 contrive, precisely after the example of Juno and Æolus in the first book of the Eneid, he brings 1 Prince Arthur would be interesting, if for no other reason, as the first English poem in which use is made of Scandinavian mythology for the purpose of epic "machinery." his hero to the court of the heathen King Hoel, who takes the hospitable part of Dido; and he occupies two books in making Arthur describe to that monarch, after the latter has been miraculously converted, the Creation of the world and the Day of Judgment. In the fourth book— Arthur having retired to bed-Hoel, who, as a listener, must have been unrivalled, hears from Lucius, the "fidus Achates" of the poem, the adventures of the Prince after the arrival of the Saxons in Britain; while, in the fifth, Arthur has a dream, suggested by the sixth book of the Eneid, in which his father, Uther, reveals to him the long succession of British Kings, leading up, of course, to a panegyric on the "brave Nassovian," and an allusion to the death of Queen Mary, imitated from Virgil's passage about the young Marcellus. But, except with regard to Virgil, Blackmore piques himself on his originality. "As I had not my eye," he says in his preface to King Arthur, "on any other model, so I am not conscious to myself of having used any author's thoughts or expressions." But though he never mentions the Gerusalemme Liberata or Paradise Lost, his King Arthur shows that he had read them both, and had directly copied from the former the episode of Armida and Rinaldo, and from the latter the debate in Pandemonium. Nevertheless, in the lower or didactic orders of poetry, when he is moving in a medium where he can observe and reason, his style is often lucid and forcible. His complimentary portraits of the Whig ministry under feigned names in King Arthur have much life: witness the following lines on Somers, written at a time when the character of that statesman stood out in brilliant contrast with the treachery of Marlborough and Godolphin: He with his wit could, when he pleased, surprise, He made their interest one, and showed the way E Creation, if it lacks the epigrammatic point and brilliancy of the Essay on Man, has more philosophic consistency. The argument against the Epicureans is conducted from first to last with great lucidity, and the ease and sprightliness of the versification entitles the poem to rank, in that order of poetry which is "fittest for discourse and nearest prose," on the same level with Nosce Teipsum and Religio Laici. The following passages will justify what is here said: Regard the orbs sublime, in ether borne, Their number, counting those the unaided eye In beauteous order all the orbs advance, When twice ten thousand men, deprived of sight, From the same ground and the same winding line: 1 Creation, book ii. The vigour of thought, diction, and numbers in the following semi-Cartesian reasoning is unmistakable :— I think, I move, I therefore know I am; While I have been, I still have been the same, But though I am, few circling years have gone, Nor from myself the secret power receive, I did not build this frame, nor do I know The hidden springs from whence my motions flow. If to myself I did not being give, Nor from immediate parents did receive, They than my parents could not more bestow. If 'twill, then must we through the order run, Did he, since independent, ever die? If from himself his own existence came, The cause, that could destroy his being, name.1 Beyond this tendency to use verse as an instrument for dialectic, another symptom of the advance of the philosophic spirit in English society, and of the more subtle refinement of taste, is afforded by the rapidly increasing popularity of mock-heroic, as a distinct species of poetical composition. This, like almost all other fields of modern poetry, was first cultivated by the Italians. Its ironic genius was congenital with the sweetness of their language, and both Berni and Ariosto proved the capacity of the romantic manner for the purpose of burlesque. But the first to produce a parody of the romantic Italian epic on regular and extended lines was Alessandro Tassoni, in La Secchia Rapita. Boileau, taking the hint from Tassoni, acclimatised the mock-heroic in French poetry 1 Creation, book vi. |