JOHN ARMSTRONG was born in Roxburghshire, in the parish of Castleton, of which his father was the clergyman. He completed his education, and took a medical degree, at the university of Edinburgh, with much reputation, in the year 1732. Amidst his scientific pursuits, he also cultivated literature and poetry. One of his earliest productions in verse, was an "Imitation of the Style of Shakspere," which received the approbation of the poets Young and Thomson; although humbler judges will perhaps be at a loss to perceive in it any striking likeness to his great original. Two other sketches, also, purporting to be imitations of Shakspere, are found among his works. They are the fragments of an unfinished tragedy. One of them, the "Dream of Progne," is not unpleasing. In the other, he begins the description of a storm by saying, that "The sun went down in wrath, the skies foam'd brass."

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It is uncertain in what year he came to London; but in 1735 he published an anonymous pamphlet, severely ridiculing the quackery of untaught practitioners. He dedicated this performance to Joshua Ward, John Moore, and others, whom he styles "the Antacademic philosophers, and the generous despisers of the schools." As a physician he never obtained extensive practice. This he himself imputed to his contempt of the little artifices, which, he alleges, were necessary to popularity: by others, the failure was ascribed to his indolence and literary avocations; and there was probably truth in both accounts. A disgraceful poem, entitled, "The Economy of Love," which he published after coming to London, might have also had its share in impeding his professional career. rected the nefarious production, at a later period of his life, betraying at once a consciousness of its impurity, and a hankering after its reputation. So unflattering were his prospects, after several years' residence in the metropolis, that he applied (it would seem without success) to be put on the medical staff of the forces, then going out to the West Indies. His "Art of Preserving Health" appeared in 1744, and justly fixed his poetical reputation. In 1746 he was appointed physician to the hospital for sick soldiers, behind Buckingham House. In 1751 he published his poem on "Benevolence;" in 1753 his "Epistle on Taste ;" and in 1758 his prose "Sketches by Launcelot Temple." Certainly none of these productions exalted the literary character which he had raised to himself by his "Art of Pre

serving Health." "Benevolence" are very insipid. His "Sketches" have been censured more than they seem to deserve for "oaths and exclamations, and for a constant struggle to say smart things *." They contain indeed some expressions which might be wished away, but these are very few in number; and several of his essays are plain and sensible, without any effort at humour.

The poems "Taste and

It

In 1760 he was appointed physician to the forces that went over to Germany. It is at this era of his life that we should expect its history to be the most amusing, and to have furnished the most important relics of observation, from his having visited a foreign country which was the scene of war, and where he was placed, by his situation, in the midst of interesting events. may be pleasing to follow heroes into retirement; but we are also fond of seeing men of literary genius amidst the action and business of life. Of Dr. Armstrong in Germany, however, we have no other information than what is afforded by his epistle to Wilkes, entitled "Day," which is by no means a bright production, and chiefly devoted to subjects of eating. With Wilkes he was, at that time, on terms of friendship; but their cordiality was afterwards dissolved by politics. Churchill took a share in the quarrel, and denounced our author as a monster of ingratitude towards Wilkes, who had been his benefactor; and Wilkes, by subsequently attacking Armstrong in the Daily Advertiser, showed that he did not disapprove of the satirist's reproaches. To such personalities Armstrong might have replied in the words of Prior,

"To John I owed great obligation,
But John unhappily thought fit
To publish it to all the nation;
Sure John and I are more than quit."

But though his temper was none of the mildest, he had the candour to speak with gratitude of Wilkes's former kindness, and acknowledged that he was indebted to him for his appointment in the

army.

After the peace he returned to London, where his practice, as well as acquaintance, was confined to a small circle of friends; but among whom he was esteemed as a man of genius. From the originality of his mind, as well as from his reading, and more than ordinary taste in the fine arts, his conversation is said to have been richly entertaining. Yet if the character which is supposed to apply to him in the "Castle of Indo* Chalmers's Biographical Dictionary.

lence" describe him justly, his colloquial delightfulness must have been intermittent. In 1770 he published a collection of his Miscellanies, containing a new prose piece, "The Universal Almanack," and "The Forced Marriage," a tragedy, which had been offered to Garrick, but refused. The whole was ushered in by a preface, full of arrogant defiance to public opinion. "He had never courted the public," he said, "and if it was true what he had been told, that the best judges were on his side, he desired no more in the article of fame as a writer." There was a good deal of matter in this collection, that ought to have rendered its author more modest. The "Universal Almanack" is a wretched production, to which the objections of his propensity to swearing, and abortive efforts at humour, apply more justly than to his "Sketches ;" and his tragedy, the "Forced Marriage," is a mortuum caput of insipidity. In the following year he visited France and Italy, and published a short, but splenetic account of his tour, under his old assumed name of Launcelot Temple. His last production was a volume of " Professional Essays," in which he took more trouble to abuse quacks than became his dignity, and showed himself a man to whom the relish of life was not improving, as its feast drew towards a close. He died in September, 1779, of a hurt, which he accidentally received in stepping out of a carriage; and, to the no small surprise of his friends, left behind him more than 30007., saved out of a very moderate income, arising principally from his half-pay.

His "Art of Preserving Health" is the most successful attempt, in our language, to incorporate material science with poetry. Its subject had the advantage of being generally interesting; for there are few things that we shall be more willing to learn, either in prose or verse, than the means of preserving the outward bulwark of all other blessings. At the same time, the difficulty of poetically treating a subject, which presented disease in all its associations, is one of the most just and ordinary topics of his praise. Of the triumphs of poetry over such difficulty, he had no doubt high precedents, to show that strong and true delineations of physical evil are not without an attraction of fearful interest and curiosity to the human mind; and that the enjoyment, which the fancy derives from conceptions of the bloom and beauty of healthful nature, may be heightened, by contrasting them with the opposite pictures of her mortality and decay. Milton had turned disease itself into a subject of sublimity, in the vision of Adam, with that intensity of the fire of genius, which converts whatever

• Armstrong's character is said to have been painted in the stanza of the "Castle of Indolence" beginning "With him was sometimes joined in silent walk (Profoundly silent, for they never spoke) One shyer still, who quite detested talk," &c. See ante, p. 408.

His

materials it meets with into its aliment; and
Armstrong, though his powers were not Miltonic,
had the courage to attempt what would have re-
pelled a more timid taste. His Muse might be
said to show a professional intrepidity in choosing
the subject; and, like the physician who braves
contagion, (if allowed to prolong the simile,) we
may add, that she escaped, on the whole, with
little injury from the trial. By the title of the
poem, the author judiciously gave his theme a
moral as well as a medical interest. He makes
the influence of the passions an entire part of it.
By professing to describe only how health is to
be preserved, and not how it is to be restored, he
avoids the unmanageable horrors of clinical de-
tail; and though he paints the disease, wisely
spares us its pharmaceutical treatment.
course through the poem is sustained with lucid
management and propriety. What is explained
of the animal œconomy is obscured by no pedan-
tic jargon, but made distinct, and, to a certain
degree, picturesque to the conception. We need
not indeed be reminded how small a portion of
science can be communicated in poetry; but the
practical maxims of science, which the Muse has
stamped with imagery and attuned to harmony,
have so far an advantage over those which are
delivered in prose, that they become more agree-
able and permanent acquisitions of the memory.
If the didactic path of his poetry is, from its na-
ture, rather level, he rises above it, on several
occasions, with a considerable strength of poetical
feeling. Thus, in recommending the vicinity of
woods around a dwelling, that may shelter us
from the winds, whilst it enables us to hear their
music, he introduces the following pleasing lines:
"Oh! when the growling winds contend, and all

The sounding forest fluctuates in the storm;
To sink in warm repose, and hear the din
Howl o'er the steady battlements, delights
Above the luxury of vulgar sleep."

In treating of diet he seems to have felt the full difficulty of an humble subject, and to have sought to relieve his precepts and physiological descriptions, with all the wealth of allusion and imagery which his fancy could introduce. The appearance of a forced effort is not wholly avoided, even where he aims at superior strains, in order to garnish the meaner topics, as when he solemnly addresses the Naiads of all the rivers in the world, in rehearsing the praises of a cup of water. But he closes the book in a strain of genuine dignity. After contemplating the effects of Time on the human body, his view of its influence dilates, with easy and majestic extension, to the universal structure of nature; and he rises from great to greater objects with a climax of sublimity. "What does not fade? the tower that long had stood The crush of thunder and the warring winds, Shook by the slow, but sure destroyer, Time, Now hangs in doubtful ruins o'er its base. And flinty pyramids, and walls of brass, Descend: the Babylonion spires are sunk;

He may, in some points, be compared advantageously with the best blank verse writers of the age; and he will be found free from their most striking defects. He has not the ambition of Akenside, nor the verbosity of Thomson. On the other hand, shall we say that he is equal in genius to either of those poets? Certainly, his originality is nothing like Thomson's; and the rapture of his heroic sentiments is unequal to that of the author of the "Pleasures of Imagination." For, in spite of the too frequently false pomp of Akenside, we still feel, that he has a devoted moral impulse, not to be mistaken for the cant of morality, a zeal in the worship of Virtue, which places her image in a high and hallowed light. Neither has his versification the nervous harmony of

Akenside's, for his habit of pausing almost uniformly at the close of the line, gives an air of formality to his numbers. His vein has less mixture than Thomson's; but its ore is not so fine. Sometimes we find him trying his strength with that author, in the same walk of description, where, though correct and concise, he falls beneath the poet of "The Seasons" in rich and graphic observation. He also contributed to “ Tue Castle of Indolence" some stanzas, describing the diseases arising from sloth, which form rather an useful back-ground to the luxuriant picture of the Castle, than a prominent part of its enchantment *.

On the whole, he is likely to be remembered as a poet of judicious thoughts and correct expression; and, as far as the rarely successful application of verse to subjects of science can be admired, an additional merit must be ascribed to the hand which has reared poetical flowers on the dry and difficult ground of philosophy.

Opening of the Poem in an Invocation to Hygeia.
DAUGHTER of Pæon, queen of every joy,
Hygeia; whose indulgent smile sustains
The various race luxuriant nature pours,
And on th' immortal essences bestows
Immortal youth; auspicious, O descend!
Thou cheerful guardian of the rolling year,
Whether thou wanton'st on the western gale,
Or shakest the rigid pinions of the north,
Diffusest life and vigour through the tracts
Of air, through earth, and ocean's deep domain.
When through the blue serenity of heaven
Thy power approaches, all the wasteful host
Of Pain and Sickness, squalid and deform'd,
Confounded sink into the loathsome gloom,
Where in deep Erebus involved the Fiends
Grow more profane. Whatever shapes of death,
Shook from the hideous chambers of the globe,
Swarm through the shuddering air: whatever
plagues

Or meagre famine breeds, or with slow wings
Rise from the putrid wat'ry element,

The damp waste forest, motionless and rank,
That smothers earth, and all the breathless winds,
Or the vile carnage of th' inhuman field;
Whatever baneful breathes the rotten south;
Whatever ills th' extremes or sudden change
Of cold and hot, or moist and dry produce;
They fly thy pure effulgence: they and all
The secret poisons of avenging Heaven,
And all the pale tribes halting in the train
Of Vice and heedless Pleasure or if aught
The comet's glare amid the burning sky,
Mournful eclipse, or planets ill-combined,

Portend disastrous to the vital world;
Thy salutary power averts their rage,
Averts the general bane and but for thee
Nature would sicken, nature soon would die.

FROM THE SAME.

Choice of a rural situation, and allegorical picture of the
Quartan Ague.

YE who amid this feverish world would wear
A body free of pain, of cares a mind;
Fly the rank city, shun its turbid air ;
Breathe not the chaos of eternal smoke
And volatile corruption, from the dead,
The dying, sick'ning, and the living world
Exhaled, to sully heaven's transparent dome
With dim mortality. It is not air

That from a thousand lungs reeks back to thine,
Sated with exhalations rank and fell,
The spoil of dunghills, and the putrid thaw
Of nature; when from shape and texture she
Relapses into fighting elements :

It is not air, but floats a nauseous mass
Of all obscene, corrupt, offensive things.
Much moisture hurts; but here a sordid bath,
With oily rancour fraught, relaxes more
The solid frame than simple moisture can.
Besides, immured in many a sullen bay
That never felt the freshness of the breeze,
This slumb'ring deep remains, and ranker grows
With sickly rest and (though the lungs abhor
To drink the dun fuliginous abyss)

* See ante p. 410.

Did not the acid vigour of the mine,
Roll'd from so many thundering chimneys, tame
The putrid steams that overswarm the sky ;
This caustic venom would perhaps corrode
Those tender cells that draw the vital air,
In vain with all the unctuous rills bedew'd ;
Or by the drunken venous tubes, that yawn
In countless pores o'er all the pervious skin
Imbibed, would poison the balsamic blood,
And rouse the heart to every fever's rage.

While yet you breathe, away; the rural wilds
Invite; the mountains call you, and the vales;
The woods, the streams, and each ambrosial breeze
That fans the ever-undulating sky;

A kindly sky whose fost'ring power regales
Man, beast, and all the vegetable reign.

Find then some woodland scene where nature smiles

Benign, where all her honest children thrive.
To us there wants not many a happy seat!
Look round the smiling land, such numbers rise
We hardly fix, bewilder'd in our choice.
See where enthroned in adamantine state,
Proud of her bards, imperial Windsor sits;
Where choose thy seat in some aspiring grove
Fast by the slowly-winding Thames ; or where
Broader she laves fair Richmond's green retreats,
(Richmond that sees an hundred villas rise
Rural or gay). O! from the summer's rage
O! wrap me in the friendly gloom that hides
Umbrageous Ham!-But if the busy town
Attract thee still to toil for power or gold,
Sweetly thou may'st thy vacant hours possess
In Hampstead, courted by the western wind ;
Or Greenwich, waving o'er the winding flood;
Or lose the world amid the sylvan wilds
Of Dulwich, yet by barbarous arts unspoil'd.
Green rise the Kentish hills in cheerful air;
But on the marshy plains that Lincoln spreads
Build not, nor rest too long thy wandering feet.
For on a rustic throne of dewy turf,
With baneful fogs her aching temples bound,
Quartana there presides; a meagre fiend
Begot by Eurus, when his brutal force
Compress'd the slothful Naiad of the Fens.
From such a mixture sprung, this fitful pest
With fev'rish blasts subdues the sick'ning land:
Cold tremors come, with mighty love of rest,
Convulsive yawnings, lassitude, and pains

That sting the burden'd brows, fatigue the loins,
And rack the joints, and every torpid limb;
Then parching heat succeeds, till copious sweats
O'erflow a short relief from former ills.
Beneath repeated shocks the wretches pine;
i. The vigour sinks, the habit melts away:
The cheerful, pure, and animated bloom
Dies from the face, with squalid atrophy
Devour'd, in sallow melancholy clad.
And oft the sorceress, in her sated wrath,
Resigns them to the furies of her train :
The bloated Hydrops, and the yellow fiend
Tinged with her own accumulated gall.

FROM THE SAME.

Recommendation of a High Situation on the Sea-coast.

MEANTIME, the moist malignity to shun

Of burthen'd skies; mark where the dry cham-
Swells into cheerful hills: where marjoram [paign
And thyme, the love of bees, perfume the air;
And where the cynorrhodon with the rose
For fragrance vies; for in the thirsty soil
Most fragrant breathe the aromatic tribes.
There bid thy roofs high on the basking steep
Ascend, there light thy hospitable fires.
And let them see the winter morn arise,
The summer evening blushing in the west :
While with umbrageous oaks the ridge behind
O'erhung, defends you from the blust'ring north,
And bleak affliction of the peevish east.
Oh! when the growling winds contend, and all
The sounding forest fluctuates in the storm;
To sink in warm repose, and hear the din
Howl o'er the steady battlements, delights
Above the luxury of vulgar sleep.
The murmuring rivulet, and the hoarser strain
Of waters rushing o'er the slippery rocks,
Will nightly lull you to ambrosial rest.
To please the fancy is no trifling good,
Where health is studied; for whatever moves
The mind with calm delight, promotes the just
And natural movements of th' harmonious frame.
Besides, the sportive brook for ever shakes
The trembling air; that floats from hill to hill,
From vale to mountain, with incessant change
Of purest element, refreshing still

Your airy seat, and uninfected gods.
Chiefly for this I praise the man who builds
High on the breezy ridge, whose lofty sides
Th' ethereal deep with endless billows chafes.
His purer mansion nor contagious years
Shall reach, nor deadly putrid airs annoy.

FROM BOOK II ENTITLED "DIET.”
Address to the Naiads.

Now come, ye Naiads, to the fountains lead ;
Now let me wander through your gelid reign.

I burn to view th' enthusiastic wilds

By mortal else untrod. I hear the din
Of waters thund'ring o'er the ruin'd cliffs.
With holy reverence I approach the rocks
Whence glide the streams renown'd in ancient song.
Here from the desert down the rumbling steep
First springs the Nile; here bursts the sounding
In angry waves; Euphrates hence devolves [Po
A mighty flood to water half the east ;
And there in gothic solitude reclined,
The cheerless Tanais pours his hoary urn.
What solemn twilight! what stupendous shades
Enwrap these infant floods! through every nerve
A sacred horror thrills, a pleasing fear
Glides o'er my frame. The forest deepens round;

And more gigantic still th' impending trees
Stretch their extravagant arms athwart the gloom.
Are these the confines of some fairy world?
A land of genii? Say, beyond these wilds
What unknown nations? If indeed beyond
Aught habitable lies. And whither leads,
To what strange regions, or of bliss or pain,
That subterraneous way? Propitious maids,
Conduct me, while with fearful steps I tread
This trembling ground. The task remains to sing
Your gifts (so Pæon, so the powers of health
Command) to praise your crystal element :
The chief ingredient in heaven's various works:
Whose flexile genius sparkles in the gem,
Grows firm in oak, and fugitive in wine ;
The vehicle, the source, of nutriment
And life, to all that vegetate or live.

O comfortable streams! with eager lips

And trembling hand the languid thirsty quaff
New life in you; fresh vigour fills their veins.
No warmer cups the rural ages knew ;
None warmer sought the sires of human kind.
Happy in temperate peace! their equal days
Felt not th' alternate fits of feverish mirth,
And sick dejection. Still serene and pleased,
They knew no pains but what the tender soul
With pleasure yields to, and would ne'er forget.
Blest with divine immunity from ails,

Long centuries they lived; their only fate
Was ripe old age, and rather sleep than death.
Oh! could those worthies from the world of gods
Return to visit their degenerate sons,
How would they scorn the joys of modern time,
With all our art and toil improved to pain!
Too happy they! but wealth brought luxury,
And luxury on sloth begot disease.

O THOU that glad'st my lonesome hours,
With many a wildly warbled song,
When Melancholy round me low'rs,

And drives her sullen storms along;
When fell Adversity prepares

To lead her delegated train,

Pale Sickness, Want, Remorse, and Pain, With all her host of carking caresThe fiends ordain'd to tame the human soul,

And give the humbled heart to sympathy's control;

Sweet soother of my mis'ry, say,

Why dost thou clap thy joyous wing? Why dost thou pour that artless lay? How canst thou, little prisoner, sing? Hast thou not cause to grieve That man, unpitying man! has rent From thee the boon which Nature meant Thou should'st, as well as he, receive— The power to woo thy partner in the grove, To build where instinct points, where chance directs to rove?

Perchance, unconscious of thy fate,

And to the woes of bondage blind,
Thou never long'st to join thy mate,
Nor wishest to be unconfined;
Then how relentless he,
And fit for every foul offence,
Who could bereave such innocence
Of life's best blessing, Liberty!

Who lured thee, guileful, to his treacherous snare, To live a tuneful slave, and dissipate his care!