in his profession. The dying man does not willingly see by
his couch one who has recently disgraced himself by an open act of
profligacy. In January 1741, he solicited Dr. Birch to use his influence
with Mead in recommending him to the appointment of Physician to the
Forces which were then going to the West Indies. It does not appear that
this application was successful; but in five years more, (February
1746,) he was nominated one of the Physicians to the Hospital for
Invalid Soldiers behind Buckingham House; and in 1760, Physician to the
Army in Germany. Meantime (in 1744) he had published his Art of
Preserving Health, a didactic poem, that soon made its way to notice,
and which, by the judiciousness of the precepts, might have tended to
raise some opinion of his medical skill. At the beginning he addresses
Mead:--

--Beloved by all the graceful arts,
And long the favourite of the healing powers.

He had now become intimate with Thomson, to whose Castle of Indolence
he contributed the three stanzas which conclude the first canto. One of
the alterations made in them by Thomson is not for the better. He had
written--

And here the gout, half tyger, half a snake,
Raged with a hundred teeth, a hundred stings;

which was changed to--

The sleepless gout here counts the crowing cocks,
A wolf now gnaws him, now a serpent stings.

When Thomson was seized with the illness of which he died, Armstrong was
one of those who were sent for to attend him.

In 1751, he published Benevolence, an Epistle to Eumenes; and in 1753,
Taste, an Epistle to a Young Critic. In the next year, he wrote the
Forced Marriage, a tragedy, which Garrick did not think fitted for the
stage. It was printed in 1770, with such of his other writings as he
considered worthy of being collected. In this book, which he entitled
Miscellanies, in two volumes, first appeared the second part of Sketches
or Essays on Various Subjects, by Launcelot Temple, Esq.; the former had
been published in 1758. Wilkes was supposed to have contributed
something to these lively trifles, which, under an air of impertinent
levity, are sometimes marked by originality and discernment. His poem
called Day, an epistle which he had addressed to Wilkes in 1761, was not
admitted by the author to take its place among the rest. For the dispute
which gave rise to this omission he was afterwards sorry; and in his
last illness declared, that what he had got in the