after his death by Mr. White of Nayland, in Essex, the minister who attended his death-bed, and testified the fervent piety of his last hours. He died on the 8th 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 deserved; his name was so long used to point every epigram upon dull writers, that it became at last a byword 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. 38 Sir Richard Blackmore, of Boxted, in Essex, made his will in May, 1729. He directs his body to be buried in Boxted Church, near his late wife. His coffin to be plain, covered with a funeral pall, but without pall-bearers. He also directs his burial to take place between eleven and twelve at night, and that no hatchment be put upon his house. His lands he directs to be sold, and the produce invested in Bank or South-Sea Stock. He died childless; and his heirs (then under age) were his nephew, Richard Blackmore Hurst, and a niece. To his nephew Hurst he leaves the interest of 2000., and the sum itself on his attaining the age of twenty-one. Should he die, however, before twenty-one, he then directs the payment of 10004. to the University of Oxford, to be laid out by the University in land, the yearly produce of which is to be spent in encouraging a student of the University (giving the preference to students of his own College, St. Edmund Hall) to write poems on Divine Subjects; the student sending in 650 lines every half year, and employing part of the other half year in writing prose pamphlets against the obscene plays and publications of the time. The poems were to be printed. As the University never obtained the bequest, the nephew must have attained twenty-one, and thus succeeded in saving the public from many folio and quarto publications of bad verse. There is a fine old mezzotinto portrait of Blackmore by Williams, after Closterman. 39 Dryden attacked him twice in verse: in the Prologue to The Pilgrim,' and in his Epistle to his kinsman, John Dryden of Chesterton; and once in prose, in the Preface to the 'Fables.' Among Wycherley's Posthumous Works' (1728, p. 67) is a poem, 'To a Doctor of Physic on his writing a Satire against Wit.' Sedley has a coarse but bitter epigram upon him. Garth introduced some of his rumbling verses into The Dispensary,' and treats them and their author with an air of contempt. Tom Brown has been frequently facetious and illnatured at his expense. Smith has a fling at him in his 'Poem on the Death of John Philips,' and Philips appears to have attacked him, though in what manner is, I believe, unknown. (Letter from Fenton to the father of the two Wartons, dated Jan. 24, 1707. See Wooll's 'Warton,' p 203; Warton's Essay on Pope,' ii. 278, ed. 1782.) Gay has a caustic copy of verses to be placed under his picture, "containing a complete catalogue of his works," with some expressions of contempt for each. Swift, in his Rhapsody on Poetry,' assigns to him the leaden crown of Flecknoe and Ned Howard. But his keenest satirist is Pope, in twenty different places. 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 his first words in which they were presented : nor does it appear that he saw beyond his own performances, or had ever elevated his ideas 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. 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. In his descriptions both of life and nature, the poet and the philosopher happily co-operate; 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."0 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 Molyneux. "But that which Arthur with most pleasure heard He turn'd their orbs, and polish'd all the stars. 40 As for the rest of those who have written against me, they are such scoundrels, that they deserve not the least notice to be taken of them. Blackmore and Milbourne are only distinguished from the crowd by being remembered to their infamy.-DRYDEN: Preface to Fables. Blackmore himself for any grand effort Would drink and dose at Tooting or Earl's Court. POPE: 2nd Ep. of 2nd book of Hor. Blackmore, in 1/19, was lying at Earl's Court. See Hughes's 'Letters,' i. 225. VOL. II. He spread the airy Ocean without shores, Where birds are wafted with their feather'd oars. How others stamped to stones, with rushing sound That racks, as if the axis of the world Was broke, and heaven's bright towers were downwards hurl'd. Did in the midst on airy columns stand; And how the soul of plants, in prison held, It only works and twists a stronger chain. Its head, and in a tender plant appears. Hence springs the oak, the beauty of the grove, Whose stately trunk fierce storms can scarcely inove. 3 Does round the elm it purple clusters twine. . Prince Arthur, book iv. |