Dr. John Armstrong, littérateur, and associate of Smollett, Thomson, Wilkes, and other celebrities / Lewis M. Knapp.
- Knapp, Lewis M. (Lewis Mansfield)
- Date:
- [1944?]
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Dr. John Armstrong, littérateur, and associate of Smollett, Thomson, Wilkes, and other celebrities / Lewis M. Knapp. Source: Wellcome Collection.
8/40 page 1026
![maintained a lively though irregular interest in writing. There is a kind of autobiography lurking in his couplet: Yet once a moon, perhaps, I steal a night And, if our sire Apollo pleases, write. (Of Benevolence, 11. 16-17) After the success of The Art of Preserving Health, the ingenious doctor broke into print at fairly regular intervals from 1744 to 1761. And his medical practice grew. Thomson, shortly before his death (about April, 1748), wrote to his friend Paterson: “Good-natured, obliging Millar, is as usual. Though the Doctor increases in business he does not decrease in spleen; but there is a certain kind of spleen that is both humane and agreeable, like Jacques in the play: I sometimes too, have a touch of it.”35 Shortly after this letter was written, there appeared in print “after four¬ teen or fifteen years,” as Thomson expressed it,36 his well known Castle of Indolence. This poem contained portraits of his friends, Armstrong being depicted, it was thought, in stanza 60 of Canto i: With him was sometimes join’d, in silent walk (Profoundly silent, for they never spoke) One shyer still, who quite detested talk: Oft stung by spleen, at once away he broke, r- ■ |To groves of pine, and broad o’ershading oak; There, inly thrilled, he wandered all alone, And on himself his pensive fury wroke, Ne never utter’d word, save when first shone The glittering star of eve—“Thank Heaven! the day is done.” To The Castle of Indolence, the best Spenserian poem of the eighteenth century, Armstrong made a slight contribution which indicates his real interest in Thomson’s creative work. To the self-portrait of Thomson, he may have contributed the line, “A bard here dwelt more fat than bard beseems,”37 and he certainly furnished many of the lines for the last four stanzas of the first canto. But a comparison of Armstrong’s four stanzas which he printed in his Miscellanies (“An Imitation of Spencer. Written at Mr. Thomson’s desire, to be inserted into the Castle of Indolence”)38 with the four stanzas as they stand in The Castle of Indolence discloses 35 See The Poetical Works of James Thomson, Aldine Edition (London, n.d. [c. I860]), i, cxii. 36 Ibid., I, cxi. 37 Oliver Elton in his Survey of English Literature, 1730-1780 (London, 1928), i, 364, cited a variant of this fine as Armstrong’s contribution. See Castle of Indolence, Canto i, stanza 68. 38 Quoted Armstrong’s Miscellanies (1770), i, 164-166.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b30632018_0008.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
