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Lives of the English Poets : Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope by Samuel Johnson
page 57 of 212 (26%)
worship; but no admission has it yet obtained, nor has it any 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 heroic poetry. There was another
monarch of this island (for he did not fetch his heroes from foreign
countries) whom he considered as worthy the epic 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 epic poems,
the first had such reputation and popularity as enraged the critics;
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 physic, 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 the reader how to oppose. He has written on the small-
pox, with a vehement invective against inoculation; on consumption,
the spleen, the gout, the rheumatism, the king's evil, the dropsy,
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