pseudo-Miltonic council of war-Belus, Milcom,
Ammon, Rimmon, &c.-discuss in long speeches
how to check the Christian champion's pro-
gress, but in vain. There are endless lists of
the princes in either camp, and the numbers
of their forces. The battle in which Arthur
triumphs is not more amusing than the rest.
Before the campaign is ended Satan effects
a diversion by stirring up strife in Britain ;
Arthur has to hasten thither, but soon returns,
and in a final battle wounds Clotar mortally,
takes the opportunity as he lies 'weltering in
his gore' to address a sermon to him about
Divine justice, and then hacks off his head and
'spurns' or apparently kicks the corpse. The
last stage of the personal conflict between the
kings proceeded thus:

The Frank observing that his arm did wield
His sword in vain against King Arthur's shield,
Retreating, to the ground did downward stoop,
And heav'd a mighty rocky fragment up.
Then did the furious warriour forward step,
And hurl'd with both his hands the pondrous heap.
The Britons trembled when they saw the stone
With such a force against their monarch thrown.
O'er Arthur's shoulder flew the flinting rock,
But as it past a craggy corner struck

The shoulder's point, and his bright armour bruis'd,
Which in his flesh a painful wound produc'd.
His friends grew pale to see that shoulder hurt,
Which did their empire and their hopes support.
The pious monarch did the wound neglect,
And for one mortal stroke did all his might collect,
Like some celestial sword of temper'd flame,
Down on the Frank keen caliburno came.
It fell upon his neck with vengeful sway,
And thro' the shrinking muscles made its way,
The head, reclin'd, on the right shoulder lay.
Down fell the Frank, disabled by the wound,
Weltering in gore and raging, bit the ground.
The pious prince did o'er the warriour stand,
Bright caliburno flaming in his hand.

Blackmore continued writing, and published a series of epics on King Alfred, Queen Elizabeth, the Redeemer, the Creation, &c. All are intolerably tedious, and have sunk into oblivion; but Pope has preserved his memory in various

satirical allusions. Addison extended his friendship to the Whig poet, whose private character was irreproachable, and strongly approved his hostility to the prevalent grossness and impiety of dramatic poetry. Dr Johnson included Blackmore in his edition of the poets, but of his works reproduced only the poem of Creation, which, he said, 'wants neither harmony of numbers, accuracy of thought, nor elegance of diction.' Even Dennis, formerly hostile, thought Blackmore surpassed Lucretius. The design of Creation was to demonstrate the existence of a Divine Eternal Mind. The worthy doctor recites the proofs of a Deity from natural and physical phenomena, and afterwards reviews the systems of the Epicureans and the Fatalists, con

cluding with a hymn to the Creator of the world. The old-fashioned orthodox piety of Blackmore is everywhere apparent in his writings; but the genius of poetry evaporates amidst tedious argumentations, commonplace illustrations, prosing declamation, and general dullness. From the opening of Creation it would appear that he deliberately designed to outsoar Milton 'to heights unknown'— to anybody but himself, presumably :

No more of courts, of triumphs, or of arms,
No more of valour's force, or beauty's charms ;
The themes of vulgar lays, with just disdain,
I leave unsung, the flocks, the amorous swain,
The pleasures of the land, and terrors of the main.
How abject, how inglorious 'tis to lie
Grovelling in dust and darkness, when on high
Empires immense, and rolling worlds of light,
To range their heavenly scenes, the muse invite!
I meditate to soar above the skies,

To heights unknown, through ways untry'd to rise:
I would th' Eternal from his works assert,
And sing the wonders of creating art.

[known.

While I this unexampled task essay, Pass awful gulfs, and beat my painful way; Celestial Dove! divine assistance bring, Sustain me on thy strong-extended wing, That I may reach th' Almighty's sacred throne, And make his causeless power, the cause of all things Thou dost the full extent of nature see, And the wide realms of vast immensity: Eternal Wisdom thou dost comprehend, Rise to her heights, and to her depths descend: The Father's sacred counsels thou canst tell, Who in his bosom didst for ever dwell. Thou on the deep's dark face, immortal dove! Thou with Almighty energy didst move On the wild waves, incumbent didst display Thy genial wings, and hatch primæval day. Order from thee, from thee distinction came, And all the beauties of the wond'rous frame. Hence stampt on nature we perfection find, Fair as th' idea in the Eternal Mind.

Garth in The Dispensary unkindly makes Blackmore cite four scraps of his own verse (quite accurately reproduced) from Prince Arthur and King Arthur as sufficiently sonorous to summon the Sibyl from the shades.

These lines the pale Divinity shall raise,
Such is the power of sound and force of lays,
Blackmore is made to say, and then cites his own:
Arms meet with arms, fauchions with fauchions clash,
And sparks of fire struck out from armour flash.
Thick clouds of dust contending warriors raise,
And hideous war o'er all the region brays.

Some raging ran with huge Herculean clubs,
Some massy balls of brass, some mighty tubs
Of cinders bore.

Naked and half-burnt hills with hideous wrack
Affright the skies and fry the ocean's back.
High rocks of snow and sailing hills of ice,
Against each other with a mighty crash
Driven by the winds in rude rencounter dash.

Blood, brains, and limbs the highest walls disdain,
And all around lay squalid heaps of slain.

In the following singular and original theodicy from Book iii. of Creation, it is noticeable that Blackmore quite admits the Creator might (but for sufficient reasons) have made a much finer world ; and he justifies the ways of God to men in the matter of having wasted so much space on mountains not from the majesty or beauty of the everlasting hills, but from their utilitarian 'convenience' for practical purposes:

You ask us why the soil the thistle breeds;
Why its spontaneous birth are thorns and weeds;
Why for the harvest it the harrow needs?

The Author might a nobler world have made,
In brighter dress the hills and vales arrayed,
And all its face in flowery scenes displayed:

The glebe untilled might plenteous crops have borne,
And brought forth spicy groves instead of thorn :
Rich fruit and flowers, without the gardener's pains,
Might every hill have crowned, have honoured all the plains:
This Nature might have boasted, had the Mind
Who formed the spacious universe designed
That man, from labour free, as well as grief,
Should pass in lazy luxury his life.

But He his creature gave a fertile soil,
Fertile, but not without the owner's toil,
That some reward his industry should crown,
And that his food in part might be his own.
But while insulting you arraign the land,
Ask why it wants the plough or labourer's hand;
Kind to the marble rocks, you ne'er complain,
That they, without the sculptor's skill and pain,
No perfect statue yield, no basse relieve,
Or finished column for the palace give.
Yet if from hills unlaboured figures came,
Man might have ease enjoyed, though never fame.
You may the world of more defect upbraid,
That other works by Nature are unmade:
That she did never, at her own expense,
A palace rear, and in magnificence
Out-rival art, to grace the stately rooms;
That she no castle builds, no lofty domes.
Had Nature's hand these various works prepared,
What thoughtful care, what labour had been spared!
But then no realm would one great master shew,
No Phidias Greece, and Rome no Angelo.
With equal reason too you might demand
Why boats and ships require the artist's hand;
Why generous Nature did not these provide,
To pass the standing lake or flowing tide.

You say the hills, which high in air arise,
Harbour in clouds, and mingle with the skies,
That earth's dishonour and encumbering load,
Of many spacious regions man defraud;
For beasts and birds of prey a desolate abode.
But can the objector no convenience find

In mountains, hills, and rocks, which gird and bind
The mighty frame, that else would be disjoined?
Do not those heaps the raging tide restrain,
And for the dome afford the marble vein?
Do not the rivers from the mountains flow,
And bring down riches to the vale below?
See how the torrent rolls the golden sand
From the high ridges to the flatter land!

The lofty lines abound with endless store
Of mineral treasure and metallic ore,
With precious veins of silver, copper, tin;
Without how barren, yet how rich within!
They bear the pine, the oak and cedar yield,
To form the palace and the navy build.

Basse relieve was one of many ways (bas relieve, bass relief, base relief) in which bas-relief used to be spelt in English.

Sir Samuel Garth, an eminent London physician, was born in 1661 at Bowland Forest in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and educated at Ingleton, Peterhouse (Cambridge), and Leyden, taking his M.D. in 1691, and being elected a Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1693. In 1699 he published his poem of The Dispensary, to aid the College in a war they were then waging with the apothecaries. The latter, supported by some of the physicians, had ventured to prescribe as well as compound medicines; and the physicians advertised that they would give advice gratis to the poor, and establish a dispensary of their own for the sale of cheap medicines. 'The original of this difference,' Garth said in the preface, 'has been of some standing, though it did not break out into fury and excess until the time of the erecting of the dispensary, a room in the college set up for the relief of the sick poor.' The College triumphed ; but in 1703 the House of Lords decided that apothecaries were entitled to exercise the privilege Garth and his brother-physicians resisted. Garth was a popular and kindly man, a firm Whig, yet the early encourager of Pope; and when Dryden died he pronounced a Latin oration over his remains. With Addison he was, politically and personally, on terms of the closest intimacy. On the accession of George I. he was knighted with Marlborough's sword, and received the double appointment of Physician-in-Ordinary to the King and Physician-General to the Army. He edited Ovid's Metamorphoses, 'translated by the most eminent hands,' in 1717, and wrote a good many prologues and occasional poems and verses, such as those inscribed on the toastglasses of the Kit-Cat Club, of which he was a member. He died 18th January 1719, and was buried in the chancel of the church at Harrowon-the-Hill. Pope praised him as 'the best good Christian he, although he knows it not;' and Bolingbroke, in oddly similar terms, called him 'the best-natured ingenious wild man I ever knew.' The Dispensary is a mock-heroic poem in six cantos, designed, Garth said, 'to rally some of our disaffected members into a sense of their duty;' it culminates in a grand combat between physicians and apothecaries. Envy and Disease play a large part, and a delegate is finally sent to the shades to consult Harvey on the matter in dispute. In the management of the plot Garth took hints both from Boileau's Lutrin and from Dryden's MacFlecknoe. Some of the leading apothecaries of the day are

happily ridiculed; but the interest of the satire has largely passed away. It opens thus:

Speak, goddess! since 'tis thou that best canst tell
How ancient leagues to modern discord fell;
And why physicians were so cautious grown
Of others' lives, and lavish of their own;
How by a journey to the Elysian plain,
Peace triumphed, and old time returned again.

Not far from that most celebrated place The Old Bailey
Where angry Justice shews her awful face;
Where little villains must submit to fate,
That great ones may enjoy the world in state;
There stands a dome, majestic to the sight, The College
of Physicians
And sumptuous arches bear its oval height;
A golden globe, placed high with artful skill,
Seems to the distant sight a gilded pill;
This pile was, by the pious patron's aim,
Raised for a use as noble as its frame;
Nor did the learn'd society decline
The propagation of that great design;
In all her mazes, Nature's face they viewed,
And, as she disappeared, their search pursued.
Wrapt in the shade of night the goddess lies,
Yet to the learn'd unveils her dark disguise,
But shuns the gross access of vulgar eyes.

Now she unfolds the faint and dawning strife
Of infant atoms kindling into life;
How ductile matter new meanders takes,
And slender trains of twisting fibres makes;
And how the viscous seeks a closer tone,
By just degrees to harden into bone;

While the more loose flow from the vital urn,
And in full tides of purple streams return;
How lambent flames from life's bright lamps arise,
And dart in emanations through the eyes;
How from each sluice a gentle torrent pours,
To slake a feverish heat with ambient showers;
Whence their mechanic powers the spirits claim;
How great their force, how delicate their frame;
How the same nerves are fashioned to sustain
The greatest pleasure and the greatest pain;
Why bilious juice a golden light puts on,
And floods of chyle in silver currents run;
How the dim speck of entity began

To extend its recent form, and stretch to man;
Why Envy oft transforms with wan disguise,
And why gay Mirth sits smiling in the eyes; .
Whence Milo's vigour at the Olympic 's shewn,
Whence tropes to Finch, or impudence to Sloane;
How matter, by the varied shape of pores
Or idiots frames or solemn senators.

Hence 'tis we wait the wondrous cause to find
How body acts upon impassive mind;
How fumes of wine the thinking part can fire,
Past hopes revive, and present joys inspire;
Why our complexions oft our soul declare,
And how the passions in the feature are;
How touch and harmony arise between
Corporeal figure and a form unseen;
How quick their faculties the limbs fulfil,
And act at every summons of the will;
With mighty truths, mysterious to descry,
Which in the womb of distant causes lie.

But now no grand inquiries are descried;
Mean faction reigns where knowledge should preside;

Feuds are increased, and learning laid aside;
Thus synods oft concern for faith conceal,
And for important nothings shew a zeal :
The drooping sciences neglected pine,
And Paan's beams with fading lustre shine. Apollo's
No readers here with hectic looks are found,
Nor eyes in rheum, through midnight watching, drowned:
The lonely edifice in sweats complains
That nothing there but sullen silence reigns.
This place, so fit for undisturbed repose,
The god of Sloth for his asylum chose;
Upon a couch of down in these abodes,
Supine with folded arms, he thoughtless nods;
Indulging dreams his godhead lull to ease,
With murmurs of soft rills, and whispering trees :
The poppy and each numbing plant dispense
Their drowsy virtue and dull indolence;
No passions interrupt his easy reign,
No problems puzzle his lethargic brain :
But dark oblivion guards his peaceful bed,
And lazy fogs hang lingering o'er his head.

The poem proceeds to show how the slumbers of the god are effectively and finally disturbed. The Sloane named so disrespectfully is the famous Sir Hans, who was one of the first subscribers to the Dispensary.

On Death.

'Tis to the vulgar death too harsh appears; The ill we feel is only in our fears.

To die is landing on some silent shore,

Where billows never break, nor tempests roar :

Ere well we feel the friendly stroke, 'tis o'er.
The wise through thought the insults of death defy,
The fools through blest insensibility.

'Tis what the guilty fear, the pious crave;
Sought by the wretch, and vanquished by the brave.
It eases lovers, sets the captive free,
And, though a tyrant, offers liberty.

(From Canto iii.)

Often-quoted fragments of the Dispensary are:
Dissensions like small streams are first begun;
Scarce seen they rise, but gather as they run.

Harsh words, though pertinent, uncouth appear;
None please the fancy who offend the ear.

Though possession be the undoubted view,
To seize is far less pleasure than pursue.

Garth wrote the epilogue to Addison's tragedy
of Cato, which ends with the following aspiration:
Oh, may once more the happy age appear,
When words were artless, and the thoughts sincere ;
When gold and grandeur were unenvied things,
And courts less coveted than groves and springs!
Love then shall only mourn when Truth complains,
And Constancy feel transport in its chains;
Sighs with success their own soft language tell,
And eyes shall utter what the lips conceal :
Virtue again to its bright station climb,
And Beauty fear no enemy but Time;
The fair shall listen to desert alone;
And every Lucia find a Cato's son.

In the same poem occurs the couplet: The woes of wedlock with the joys we mix; 'Tis best repenting in a coach and six.

Richard Duke (1659?-1711), the son of a substantial London citizen, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, lived for a time a dissolute life with the courtiers, wits, playwrights and actors, and wrote a good many poems which Dr Johnson found 'not below mediocrity.' There are translations from Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, and Theocritus; epistles or addresses to Waller, Dryden, Otway, Creech, and others; The Review, an unfinished political satire; poems on the birth, death, marriage, or accession of princes and private persons, and a number of songs. Duke was one of the wits when Swift was a child, as Swift said, but took orders before 1685, held with credit several cures, published sermons, and was by-and-by chaplain to the Queen's Most Gracious Majesty as well as to the Bishop of Winchester, with the rich living of Witney in Oxfordshire.

To Mr Waller.

When shame for all my foolish youth had writ
Advised 'twas time the rhyming trade to quit,
Time to grow wise, and be no more a wit-
The noble fire that animates thy age
Once more inflam'd me with poetic rage.

Kings, heroes, nymphs, the brave, the fair, the young,
Have been the theme of thy immortal song:
A nobler argument at last thy Muse,

Two things divine, Thee and Herself, does choose.
Age, whose dull weight makes vulgar spirits bend,
Gives wings to thine, and bids it upward tend:
No more confined, above the starry skies,
Out from the body's broken cage it flies.
But oh, vouchsafe not wholly to retire,
To join with and complete th' ethereal choir!
Still here remain; still on the threshold stand;
Still at this distance view the promised land;
Though thou may'st seem, so heavenly is thy sense,
Not going thither, but new come from thence.
An Epistle to Mr Otway.

Dear Tom, how melancholy I am grown
Since thou hast left this learned dirty town,
To thee by this dull letter be it known.
Whilst all my comfort, under all this care,
Are duns, and puns, and logic, and small beer.
Thou seest I'm dull as Shadwell's men of wit,
Or the top scene that Settle ever writ :
The sprightly Court that wander up and down
From gudgeons to a race, from town to town,
All, all are fled; but them I well can spare,
For I'm so dull I have no business there.
I have forgot whatever there I knew,
Why men one stocking tye with ribbon blue :
Why others medals wear, a fine gilt thing,
That at their breasts hang dangling by a string;
I know no officer of court; nay more,
No dog of court, their favourite before.
Unpolish'd thus, an errant scholar grown,
What should I do but sit and coo alone,
And thee, my absent mate, for ever moan.

William Walsh (1663-1708) was the son of the lord of the manor of Abberley in Worcestershire, left Wadham College without a degree, and in 1698 was sent to Parliament for his native county.

Throughout life he supported the Whig and the Honoverian interest. Johnson honoured him with a place among the poets, though in his judgment he had 'more elegance than vigour,' and seldom rises higher than to be pretty. He was for a while Master of the Horse, and was a man of fashion, 'ostentatiously splendid in his dress.' He is known chiefly through his connection with Pope, whom, when still a young man, he helped with encouragement, advice, and criticism, for which Pope was very grateful. It was he who gave Pope the famous advice to try and be a correct poet, as this was now the only way of excellency. His own poems comprise pastorals, eclogues, imitations of Virgil and Horace, and a variety of love poems and occasional verses, some of them sprightly enough.

The Unrewarded Lover.

Let the dull merchant curse his angry fate,

And from the winds and waves his fortune wait:
Let the loud lawyer break his brains, and be
A slave to wrangling coxcombs, for a fee:
Let the rough soldier fight his prince's foes,
And for a livelihood his life expose :

I wage no war, I plead no cause but Love's;
I fear no storms but what Celinda moves.
And what grave censor can my choice despise?
But here, fair charmer, here the difference lies:
The merchant, after all his hazard's past,
Enjoys the fruit of his long toils at last ;
The soldier high in his king's favour stands,
And, after having long obey'd, commands;
The lawyer, to reward his tedious care,
Roars on the bench, that babbled at the bar:
While I take pains to meet a fate more hard,
And reap no fruit, no favour, no reward.

Written in a Lady's Table-book.

With what strange raptures would my soul be blest,
Were but her book an emblem of her breast!
As I from that all former marks efface,
And, uncontrolled, put new ones in their place;
So might I chace all others from her heart,
And my own image in the stead impart.
But ah, how short the bliss would prove, if he
Who seized it next might do the same by me!

Death.

What has this bugbear Death that's worth our care?
After a life in pain and sorrow past,
After deluding hope and dire despair,

Death only gives us quiet at the last.

How strangely are our love and hate misplaced! Freedom we seek, and yet from freedom flee ; Courting those tyrant sins that chain us fast, And shunning Death, that only sets us free.

"Tis not a foolish fear of future pains,

(Why should they fear who keep their souls from stains?) That makes me dread thy terrors, Death, to see : 'Tis not the loss of riches, or of fame, Or the vain toys the vulgar pleasures name; 'Tis nothing, Calia, but the losing thee.

Phyllis's Resolution.

When slaves their liberty require,

They hope no more to gain, But you not only that desire,

But ask the power to reign.

Think how unjust a suit you make,

Then you will soon decline;

Your freedom when you please pray take,

But trespass not on mine.

No more in vain, Alcander, crave,

I ne'er will grant the thing,

That he who once has been my slave

Should ever be my king.

John Dunton (1659-1733), son of the rector of Graffham, Hunts, was apprenticed to a London bookseller, and acquired much varied knowledge, in spite of love, politics, and other distractions. He took a shop, married happily, made some lucky ventures, but was involved in financial troubles as security for relatives. He visited America, Holland, and Cologne, settled with his creditors, and kept shop for ten years with fair prosperity, his Athenian Gazette (afterwards Athenian Mercury, 1691-97) being specially successful as one of the earliest journals devoted to answering correspondents. He wrote political pamphlets on the Whig side, satires, &c., to the number of forty, published six hundred books, and carried out a few of the 'six hundred projects' he cherished. He married a second time unhappily, and under the real and imaginary troubles of his later years his mind seems to have crossed the line between crackbrained flightiness and sheer lunacy, as may be gathered from his extraordinary Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705).

An abridgment of the Athenian Oracle, Dunton's own fourvolume selection of articles from the Athenian Mercury, was edited by John Underhill in 1892.

one of

George Stepney (1663-1707) was Johnson's poets, reported in youth to have made 'grey authors blush,' but adjudged by Johnson to have 'little either of the grace of wit or the vigour of nature.' And time has confirmed this judgment: Stepney's poems figure in collections like Chalmers's British Poets, but nobody reads them, and his name is all but forgotten. Of Pembrokeshire stock, he was the son of a groom of the chamber to Charles II., became famous at Cambridge as a writer of Latin verse, and chose a diplomatic career. Than this envoy to the Emperor, to the Elector Palatine, the Electors of Brandenburg, Saxony, Mainz, Treves, and Cologne, and the Landgrave of Hesse, 'no Englishman knew the affairs of Germany so well and few Germans better.' His work is but small in volume. He made some free translations or imitations from Juvenal, Horace, and Ovid, praised William III. and Mary in neat and commonplace verses as he had done James II., and wrote 'occasional poems,' like so many of his contemporaries.

Dreams.

At dead of night imperial Reason sleeps,
And Fancy with her train loose revels keeps ;
Then airy phantoms a mix'd scene display,
Of what we heard, or saw, or wish'd by day;
For memory those images retains

Which passion form'd, and still the strongest reigns.
Huntsmen renew the chace they lately run,

And generals fight again their battles won.
Spectres and furies haunt the murderer's dreams;
Grants or disgraces are the courtier's themes.
The miser spies a thief, or a new hoard;
The cit's a knight, the sycophant a lord.
Thus fancy's in the wild distraction lost,
With what we most abhor or covet most.
But of all passions that our dreams control,
Love prints the deepest image in the soul.

...

John Pomfret (1667-1702) was the son of the rector of Luton, Bedfordshire, and himself a clergyman. In 1695 he became rector of Maulden, also in Bedfordshire, and had the prospect of preferment; but the Bishop of London, absurdly regarding as immoral in the mouth of a married clergyman the gently cynical wish to have no wife, expressed in The Choice, considered and rejected the poetical candidate. Detained in London by this unsuccessful negotiation, Pomfret caught smallpox and died. His works comprise occasional poems and some 'Pindaric Essays' in Cowley's manner; Cruelty and Lust, on Colonel Kirke's proceedings; and Reason: a Poem upon the Divine Attributes. The only piece of Pomfret's now remembered-we can hardly say read-is The Choice. Dr Johnson said that perhaps no poem in our language had been oftener perused; and Southey still asked why Pomfret was the most popular among the English poets. It is difficult nowadays to conceive that The Choice could ever have been a truly popular poem. It is a graceful but tame and monotonous celebration, in neat verse, of the mild joys of a country retirement, a modest dwelling, with wood, garden, and stream, a clear and competent estate, and the enjoyment of lettered ease and happiness -a subject sufficiently often handled by Pomfret's contemporaries; and Thomson and Cowper, one might have thought, would long ere Southey's time have obliterated all but the dim memory of Pomfret's commonplaces.

From The Choice.'

If Heaven the grateful liberty would give
That I might choose my method how to live;
And all those hours propitious fate should lend,
In blissful ease and satisfaction spend ;
Near some fair town I'd have a private seat,
Built uniform, not little nor too great ;
Better if on a rising-ground it stood;
On this side fields, on that a neighbouring wood.
It should within no other things contain
But what are useful, necessary, plain;
Methinks 'tis nauseous, and I'd ne'er endure
The needless pomp of gaudy furniture.
A little garden grateful to the eye
And a cool rivulet run murmuring by;