where Dryden left it, and persecuting this worthy man with
yet a severer degree of satire. Blackmore had been informed by Curl,
that Mr. Pope was the author of a Travestie on the first Psalm, which he
takes occasion to reprehend in his Essay on Polite Learning, vol. ii. p.
270. He ever considered it as the disgrace of genius, that it should be
employed to burlesque any of the sacred compositions, which as they
speak the language of inspiration, tend to awaken the soul to virtue,
and inspire it with a sublime devotion. Warmed in this honourable cause,
he might, perhaps, suffer his zeal to transport him to a height, which
his enemies called enthusiasm; but of the two extremes, no doubt can be
made, that Blackmore's was the safest, and even dullness in favour of
virtue (which, by the way, was not the case with Sir Richard) is more
tolerable than the brightest parts employed in the cause of lewdness and
debauchery.

The poem for which Sir Richard had been most celebrated, was,
undoubtedly, his Creation, now deservedly become a classic. We cannot
convey a more amiable idea of this great production, than in the words
of Mr. Addison, in his Spectator, Number 339, who, after having
criticised on that book of Milton, which gives an account of the Works
of Creation, thus proceeds, 'I cannot conclude this book upon the
Creation, without mentioning a poem which has lately appeared under that
title. The work was undertaken with so good an intention, and executed
with so great a mastery, that it deserves to be, looked upon as one of
the most useful and noble productions in our English verse. The reader
cannot but be pleased to find the depths of philosophy, enlivened with
all the charms of poetry, and to see so great a strength of reason
amidst so beautiful a redundancy of the imagination. The author has
shewn us that design in all the works of nature, which necessarily leads
us to the knowledge of its first cause. In short, he has illustrated, by
numberless and incontestable instances, that divine wisdom, which the
son of Sirach has so nobly ascribed to the Supreme Being in his
formation of the world, when he tells us, that he _created her, and saw
her, and numbered her, and poured her out upon all his works_.'

The design of this excellent poem is to demonstrate the self-existence
of an eternal mind, from the created and dependent existence of the
universe, and to confute the hypothesis of the Epicureans and the
Fatalists, under