Poetaster, was born at Corsham, Wilts, and educated at Westminster and Oxford, taking his B.A. in 1674. First a schoolmaster, and then a London physician (1687–1722), he was knighted in 1697, and died at Boxted, Essex, in 1729. He wrote six epics in sixty books (all on the loftiest themes), besides versions of various books of the Bible, and theological, medical and miscellaneous treatises.

  Wrote “Prince Arthur” (1695); “King Arthur” (1697); “Pharaphrases of the Book of Job, &c.” (1700); “A Satire upon Wit” (1700); “Eliza” (1705); “Creation” (1712); “The Lay Monk” (1713); “King Alfred” (1713); “The Accomplished Preacher” (1729); and other works.

Personal

  He was a commonplace man with an amiable faith in himself, and without intellect to distinguish between good and bad in poetry. His religious purpose was sincere, and it gave dignity to his work in the eyes even of Locke and Addison.

General

  The two elaborate poems of Blackmore and Milton, the which, for the dignity of them, may very well be looked upon as the two grand exemplars of poetry, do either of them exceed, and are more to be valued than all the poets, both of the Romans and the Greeks put together.

  ’Tis strange that an author should have a gamester’s fate, and not know when to give over. Had the City Bard stopped his hand at “Prince Arthur,” he had missed knighthood, ’tis true, but he had gone off with some applause.

  It [“The Creation.”] 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.

  Boileau can write upon a Lutrin what one can read with pleasure a thousand times, and Blackmore cannot write upon the “Creation” any thing that one shall not yawn ten times over, before one has read it once.

  ’Tis true, sir Richd. was a poet, but he is not placed by the best judges at the top head, notwithstanding Molyneux says in his Letters in Locke’s works, p. 568, that “all our English poets (except Milton) have been ballad makers, in comparison to him.”

  Mean circumstances in solemn description seem ridiculous to those who are sensible of the incongruity, except where the effect of that incongruity is counteracted by certain causes to be specified hereafter. Of this blunder in composition the poetry of Blackmore supplies thousands of examples. The lines on Etna quoted in the treatise on the Bathos, are well known. By his contrivance, the mountain is made to labour, not with a subterraneous fire and external conflagration, but with a fit of the colic; an idea, that seems to have been familiar to him (for we meet with it in other parts of his work); whether from his being subject to that distemper, or, as a physician, particularly successful in curing it, I cannot say. This poet seems to have had no notion of any thing more magnificent, than the usages of his own time and neighbourhood; which, accordingly, he transfers to the most awful subjects, and thus degrades into burlesque what he meant to raise to sublimity.

  Blackmore’s prose is not the prose of a poet, for it is languid, sluggish, and lifeless; his diction is neither daring nor exact, his flow neither rapid or easy, and his periods neither smooth not strong…. 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…. 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 principales, and he left minute researches to those whom he considered as little minds.

  The author’s good intentions cannot be denied; but good intentions do not make poetry; and we feel, with Cowper, that the pious Knight has committed “more absurdities in verse than any writer of our country.”

  The most notorious verse-writer, after Garth, of the interregnum between Pope and Dryden was the luckless Sir Richard Blackmore, one of the small and curious company who have been made immortal by their satirists…. “Creation,” however, was highly praised, not merely by Addison, to whom piety and Whiggery combined would have been an irresistible bribe, but by Johnson, to whom the second quality would have neutralised the first. It is difficult for a reader of the present day to share their admiration. “Creation” supplies (as, for the matter of that, do the other poems, so far as the present writer knows them) tolerable rhetoric in verse occasionally not bad. But this is a different thing from poetry. Blackmore’s couplets are often enjambed.