This gentleman is author of more original poems, of a considerable length, besides a variety of other works, than can well be conceived could have been composed by one man, during the longest period of human life.  He was a chaste writer; he struggled in the cause of virtue, even in those times, when vice had the countenance of the great, and when an almost universal degeneracy prevailed.  He was not afraid to appear the advocate of virtue, in opposition to the highest authority, and no lustre of abilities in his opponents could deter him from stripping vice of those gaudy colours, with which poets of the first eminence had cloathed her.

An elegant writer having occasion to mention the state of wit in the reign of King Charles II, characterizes the poets in the following manner;

  The wits of Charles found easier ways to fame: 
  Nor sought for Johnson’s art, nor Shakespear’s flame: 
  Themselves they studied; as they lived, they writ,
  Intrigue was plot, obscenity was wit. 
  Their cause was gen’ral, their supports were strong,
  Their slaves were willing, and their reign was long.

Mr. Pope somewhere says,

  Unhappy Dryden—­in all Charles’s days,
  Roscommon only boasts unspotted lays.

He might likewise have excepted Blackmore, who was not only chaste in his own writings, but endeavoured to correct those who prostituted the gifts of heaven, to the inglorious purposes of vice and folly, and he was, at least, as good a poet as Roscommon.

Sir Richard had, by the freedom of his censures on the libertine writers of his age, incurred the heavy displeasure of Dryden, who takes all opportunities to ridicule him, and somewhere says, that he wrote to the rumbling of his chariot wheels.  And as if to be at enmity with Blackmore had been hereditary to our greatest poets, we find Mr. Pope taking up the quarrel where Dryden left it, and persecuting this worthy man with yet a severer degree of satire.  Blackmore had been informed by Curl, that Mr. Pope was the author of a Travestie on the first Psalm, which he takes occasion to reprehend in his Essay on Polite Learning, vol. ii. p. 270.  He ever considered it as the disgrace of genius, that it should be employed to burlesque any of the sacred compositions, which as they speak the language of inspiration, tend to awaken the soul to virtue, and inspire it with a sublime devotion.  Warmed in this honourable cause, he might, perhaps, suffer his zeal to transport him to a height, which his enemies called enthusiasm; but of the two extremes, no doubt can be made, that Blackmore’s was the safest, and even dullness in favour of virtue (which, by the way, was not the case with Sir Richard) is more tolerable than the brightest parts employed in the cause of lewdness and debauchery.