122 THE NEW SCIENCE AND ENGLISH LITERATURE 



free of charge to the poor, wrote The Dispensary (1699) "to 

 purge his mind". The satire is on astrologers and physicians, and 

 generally confines itself to the abuse among the men of these two 

 fraternities. Like other satirists, however, he does not always dis- 

 criminate ; Sloane and Bentley are no better than Lilly and Charles 

 Boyle.^''^ The author was much praised on account of this poem 

 because the general reader felt he was a true champion of the op- 

 ressed. John Pomf ret repeats this satire in iJeason (1700). "More 

 than once", he says, "we have seen that blundering Sloane, miss- 

 ing the gout, by chance has hit the stone. Among the 'impious 

 race' of physicians there is a continued war between alkalis and 

 acids". The sting of his satire is found in these two lines, — 

 "Wliat's all the noisy jargon of the schools, 



But idle nonsense of laborious fools?" 

 Blackmore, in his eagerness to establish orthodox belief, found 

 himself denouncing all forms of human philosophy, in the first 

 two books of The Creation. "There is no philosophy", he cries, 

 "without a God".®° Descartes, Gassendus, Copernicus, Ptolemy, 

 Kepler, Newton pursued their studies in vain. "Move, which mil 

 please you, earth or sun",''^ account for the mountains by myth or 

 for the tides by the motion of the earth or the influence of the 

 moon,®2 turn the world as you will and by what force you will, 

 magnetism or gravitation,^^ in the final analysis the true solution 

 to every question is, — "This is done by the power of God". It 

 was poetic enthusiasm that carried Blackmore to this point of 

 utter repudiation. As will be shown later, he was really in ac- 

 cord with the new ideas, at least in physiology. And even here 

 in spite of his opposition he has caught a new glimpse of the im- 

 mensity of space. 



' ' Regard the orb sublime, in ether borne, 



Which the blue regions of the skies adorn ; 



Compar'd with whose extent this low hung ball. 



Shrunk to a point, is despicably small. "^* 



^^ Works of the Minor Poets, pp. 188, 205, 310. 



""Bk. 1. 



« Ibid. 



«a Ibid. 



«Bk. 2. 



M Ibid. 



