ny 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 heroick 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 epick 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 epick poems, the first had such reputation and popularity as
enraged the criticks; 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 physick, 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 his reader how to oppose. He has written
on the smallpox, with a vehement invective against inoculation; on
consumptions, the spleen, the gout, the rheumatism, 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 physick 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 smallpox,
will afford a specimen; in which, when the reader finds,