Blackmore, SIR RICHARD

Blackmore, SIR RICHARD, court physician to William III. and Queen Anne, is remembered as the most heavy and voluminous of poetasters. Born at Corsham in Wiltshire, he was educated at Westminster and Oxford, taking his B.A. in 1674. He was first a schoolmaster, then a London physician (1687-1722), and died at Boxted, Essex, in 1729. He seems to have been a good and well-meaning man, and the merciless ridicule of contemporary wits was due, in some part at least, to the moral and religious tone of his works, and to his free censures of the libertinism of the time. But the worthlessness of the poems has been amply confirmed by the judgment of posterity. The Creation, considered his best, Addison pronounces 'one of the most useful and noble productions in our English verse;' but few modern readers are likely to examine the grounds of this judgment, still less to agree with it. Blackmore wrote six epics in sixty books (choosing always the loftiest themes), besides versions of various books of the Bible, and theological, medical, and miscellaneous treatises.