John Armstrong

Who was John Armstrong?

Dr. John Armstrong was a physician, poet, and satirist. He was the son of the minister of Castleton, Roxburghshire, Scotland and earned his MD at the renowned University of Edinburgh before establishing a practice in London.

He is remembered as the friend of James Thomson, David Mallet, and other literary celebrities of the time, and as the author of a poem on The Art of Preserving Health, which appeared in 1744, and in which a somewhat unpromising subject for poetic treatment is gracefully and ingeniously handled. His other works, consisting of some poems and prose essays, and a drama, The Forced Marriage, are forgotten, with the exception of "The Oeconomy of Love and the four stanzas at the end of the first part of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, describing the diseases incident to sloth, which he contributed.

The "Oeconomy Of Love" has been described as an eighteenth-century guide to sex and is particularly interesting in that the lines:

"To shed thy blossoms thro' the desert air, And sow thy perish'd offspring in the winds"

are thought to be a possible inspiration for the more famous lines by Thomas Gray contained in his "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard" as follows: