could have dangled after managers, or have used the access he had been offered to the prostituted patronage of two or three great men, to whose taste he did not choose to appeal; or, after all, if any but the two female characters could have been properly represented at the time when the piece was finished."

"The Art of Preserving Health" is the great solid pillar on which our poet's reputation must rest. It stands high among didactic poems; and, more than many writers of such productions, Armstrong seems to have understood their true differential quality. The object of a didactic poet should not be to exhaust his subject, not to go into its minutiæ, not to lecture on it, or, properly speaking, to teach it at all; but to shew the poetry that is in it, and to surround its edges with a circle of beauty. Who now reads any of our celebrated poems of this class for the sake of being instructed? Who reads Lucretius on account of his Atheistic philosophy, and not for his broad and glowing pictures of nature? Who (save Triptolemus Yellowley!) has ever taken the Georgics as a text-book for modern husbandry? Who now cares for Akenside as a philosopher, however much he may admire him as a poet? Who does not positively despise the morality and religion, while admitting the brilliance, of the "Essay on Man"? And who, as we notice in another part of this volume, reads the "Fleece" for its wool-combing details, instead of its many poetic beauties? And so, still more, it is with Armstrong's poem; who knows, too, that this is to be the case with his readers, and, therefore, hurries over in general the technicalities of his theme, and diversifies it by numerous and eloquent digressions. His book is no "Buchan's Domestic Medicine" done into blank verse. His medical precepts,

indeed, seem in the main just; but it is not these that rivet your attention: it is his address to the dear stream of his boyhood-it is the description of the sleeper lulled to repose,

"Beyond the luxury of vulgar sleep,"

*Since this notice of Armstrong was in type, De Quincey's new volume, "Leaders of Literature," has appeared; where, under the article "Pope," our readers will find a singular coincidence with, and expansion of, the above views of didactic poetry.

by the midnight blasts—it is his powerful picture of "The Nightmare," in the third book—it is his graphic and awful photograph of "The Sweating Sickness," a passage which ranks with the descriptions of " The Plague" in Thucydides, Boccacio, and Defoe-and above all, it is the noble close of Book II., beginning with

"What does not fade? The tower that long had stood:"

it is these that make "The Art of Preserving Health" immortal. We well remember to have heard Thomas Campbell reading this last passage in the Common Hall of Glasgow College with great enthusiasm, as he proposed it to the students as the subject of a prize translation into Latin verse. Scarcely inferior is the "Address to the Sun," in the end of Book I., closing with the magnificently strong and simple lines::

"We court thy beams, great majesty of day! If not the soul, the regent of this world, First-born of heaven, and only less than God.” This poem, like every other, has its faults-being here a little pedantic, and there verging on, although not over, the brink of the luscious. Still, taking it as a whole, it is, next to "The Seasons" and "The Pleasures of Hope," the finest didactic poem that has issued from the Scottish genius.

Note. Since writing the first part of this memoir, we have met with an intelligent gentleman, originally from Liddesdale, who gave us a few little particulars, which we may now add. Castleton is the old name of the district of Liddesdale, as well as of a parish. Armstrong's brother, who, as we surmised, had succeeded his father as parish clergyman, was a flaming Anti-Jacobite; so much so, that, when in 1745 Lord Perth was in the neighbourhood with his rebels, he sent a party to arrest him: he fled to Northumberland. On the Sabbath after the battle of Culloden, when the news reached Armstrong, who had returned to his parish, he gave out as his morning psalm the first verses of the seventyninth psalm, including the lines :—

"Their blood about Jerusalem

Like water they have shed;
And there was none to bury them
When they were slain and dead."

This might almost have been interpreted into sympathy with the victims of Cumberland; but it is the constant tradition of the parish, that he thus communicated to his hearers the intelligence he had first received.

ARMSTRONG'S POETICAL WORKS.

PREFACE.

THE author of the following pieces has at last taken the trouble upon him to collect them, and to have them printed under his own inspection; a task that he had long avoided, and to which he would hardly have submitted himself at last, but for the sake of preventing their being, some time hereafter, exposed in a ragged mangled condition, and loaded with more faults than they originally had: while it might be impossible for him, by the change perhaps of one letter, to recover a whole period from the most contemptible nonsense.

Along with such pieces as he had formerly offered to the public, he takes this opportunity of presenting it with several others; some of which had lain by him many years. What he has lost, and especially what he has destroyed, would, probably enough, have been better received by the great majority of readers, than anything he has published.

But he never courted the public. He wrote chiefly for his own amusement; and because he found it an agreeable and innocent way of sometimes passing an idle hour. He has always most heartily despised the opinion of the Mobility, from the lowest to the highest: and if it is true, what he has sometimes been told, that the best judges are on his side, he desires no more in the article of fame and renown as a writer. If the best judges of this age honour him with their approbation, all the worst too of the next will favour him with theirs; when by Heaven's grace he'll be too far beyond the reach of their unmeaning praises to receive any disgust from them.

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