Richard Blackmore - Non-epic Writing

Non-epic Writing

Blackmore was a religious author when he was not a political author. In 1713 he and his friend John Hughes began a periodical modelled on The Spectator entitled The Lay Monk. It only ran from 13 November 1713 to 15 February 1714 and appeared once every three weeks during that period. All the same, Blackmore had its issues collected and published as The Lay Monastery in the year the journal foundered.

In 1716, he became censor as well as a director of the College of Physicians, but the Hanoverians were not as taken with Blackmore as William or Anne had been. In that year, he had two volumes of Essays upon Several Subjects published, with an attack on Alexander Pope in the second volume. In 1718, he again went to press with A Collection of Poems on Various Subjects, which collected shorter poems that had already been published.

Blackmore was very concerned with Protestantism. He joined the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in America in 1704. He wrote Just Prejudices against the Arian Hypothesis, putatively against Deism and Unitarianism in 1721 and then, to help matters, wrote Modern Arians Unmasked in the same year. He also produced A New Version of the Psalms of David in 1721 and tried to get the Church of England to accept them as canonical translations. The next year, he resigned his governing position in the College of Physicians, and he also continued his campaign against supposed Arians with Redemption. In 1724, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was set to publish Blackmore's Psalms as official for America, but the Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson (a conservative, but a Whig), opposed the project and kept it from coming to fruition.

Finally, Blackmore attempted to answer Deism again with Natural Theology, or, Moral Duties Consider'd apart from Positive in 1728. In 1731, his last work, The Accomplished Preacher, was published posthumously.