ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS 3 



Biographical Dictionary declares that it is " undeserving 

 of. the neglect into which it has fallen." Will you, in 

 these circumstances, permit me for one moment to recall 

 this author to your recollection. We need not burden 

 our memories with many facts concerning his life, which 

 was uneventful. A son of the minister of Castleton in 

 Liddesdale, he was born in the ma.nse there, in 1709 — 

 nine years later, that is, than Thomson. He entered the 

 medical profession, went to London, and was there 

 befriended as a fellow-countryman by the elder poet. 

 This was on the occasion of his first attempts in literature.* 

 His principal poem first saw the light in 1744. Perhaps 

 it may be of some interest here to compare it in one or 

 two particulars with the so much better known poem 

 of the greater Roxburghshire poet. Both poems then 

 belong, of course, to that didactic-descriptive school or 

 period of poetry which was inaugurated by Thomson's 

 Seasons and closed by Campbell's Pleasures of Hope. 

 And at first sight they appear to have this also in 

 common — supreme felicity in the choice of a subject. 

 For if there ever was a theme of eternal and universal 

 interest, it is surely the Preservation of Health ! A 

 second glance, however, reveals the fact that the treatment 

 of that theme in poetry presents peculiar difficulties. 

 Obviously health in itself is poetic, but whether the 

 means of preserving or attaining to it are equally so is 

 less certain. Great, however, as his difficulties were, 

 we are bound, I think, in justice to acknowledge that 

 Armstrong fairly triumphed over them. His method of 

 procedure was as follows. Going to the fountain-head 

 of all great didactic poetry, the De Reriim Naturd of 

 Lucretius for his model, he treats in his four Books of 

 Air, Diet, Exercise, and the Passions. His precepts, if 

 seldom novel, are invariably sound and judicious — in 

 fact they may be said to sum up and enforce the 



* Gary's "Lives of English Poets," p. 94. 



