picture. It is a mark of the purity of his taste, that he never, as some have done, dégenerates into the mock-heroic, by using a pomp of expression to elevate trivial or subordinate circumstances. Nor,' on the other hand, does he degrade those circumstances still lower, by poverty of style. Where the subject admits not of ornament, he contrives to please by graceful simplicity, and by happily chosen epithets and illustrations; but where it affords scope to his talents, he rises into dignity, and not seldom into grandeur and sublimity. Among many passages which may be adduced, to vindicate to him the possession of high poetic powers, are the addresses to Hygeia and to the Naiads, and the descriptions of the sweating sickness, and of the perishable nature of all earthly things. The Art of Preserving Health' has been frequently reprinted, and as, while the human race continues to exist, the interest excited by Armstrong's theme must always be as strong as it now is, there is no probability that his poem will ever sink into oblivion. It is not likely to be superseded by the work of any future writer, and it can be rendered obsolete by nothing short of an entire change in the structure of our language,

ADVERTISEMENT.

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: when 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 any thing 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 will be too far beyond the reach of their unmeaning praises to receive any disgust from them.

THE

ART OF PRESERVING HEALTH.

In Four Books.

BOOK I.

AIR.

DAUGHTER of Paan, queen of every joy,
Hygeia'; whose indulgent smile sustains
The various race luxuriant Nature pours,
And on the' immortal essences bestows
Immortal youth; auspicious, O descend!
Thou, cheerful guardian of the rolling year,
Whether thou wanton'st on the western gale,
Or shakest the rigid pinions of the north,
Diffusest life and vigour through the tracts
Of air, through earth, and ocean's deep domain.
When through the blue serenity of heaven
Thy power approaches, all the wasteful host
Of Pain and Sickness, squalid and deform'd,
Confounded, sink into the loathsome gloom
Where, in deep Erebus involved, the fiends
Grow more profane. Whatever shapes of death,

1 Hygeia, the goddess of health, was, according to the genealogy of the heathen deities, the daughter of Esculapius; who, as well as Apollo, was distinguished by the name of Pæan.

Shook from the hideous chambers of the globe, Swarm through the shuddering air; whatever plagues

Or meagre famine breeds, or with slow wings
Rise from the putrid watery element,

The damp waste forest, motionless and rank,
That smothers earth and all the breathless winds,
Or the vile carnage of the' inhuman field;
Whatever baneful breathes the rotten south;
Whatever ills the' extremes or sudden change
Of cold and hot, or moist and dry produce;
They fly thy pure effulgence-they, and all
The secret poisons of avenging Heaven,
And all the pale tribes halting in the train
Of Vice and heedless Pleasure—or if aught
The comet's glare amid the burning sky,
Mournful eclipse, or planets ill combined,
Portend disastrous to the vital world;
Thy salutary power averts their rage,
Averts the general bane: and but for thee
Nature would sicken, Nature soon would die.
Without thy cheerful active energy

No rapture swells the breast, no poet sings,
No more the maids of Helicon delight.
Come then with me, O goddess, heavenly gay!
Begin the song; and let it sweetly flow,
And let it wisely teach thy wholesome laws :
How best the fickle fabric to support
Of mortal man; in healthful body how
A healthful mind the longest to maintain.'
'Tis hard, in such a strife of rules, to choose
The best, and those of most extensive use;
Harder, in clear and animated song,
Dry philosophic precepts to convey.