“If the queen won’t swallow my pills she will my flattery,” he is said to have whispered to his friend Swift; but this report is doubtful, as he stood in fear of the displeasure of the querulous, crotchety, weak-minded queen, who had but recently discharged Dr. Radcliffe for a slip of the tongue, when at the coffee-house he had said she had the “vapors.”
“What is the hour?” asked the queen of Arbuthnot.
“Whatever hour it may please your majesty,” was his characteristic reply, with his most winning smile and graceful obeisance.
By this sort of flattery he retained his hold in the queen’s favor till her death.
By these facts one is reminded of the saying of Oxenstierna, when, on concluding the peace of Westphalia in 1648, he sent his young son John as plenipotentiary to the powers on that occasion, remarking, in presence of those who expressed their surprise thereat,—
“You do not know with how little wisdom men are governed.”
With the loss of the queen’s patronage at her death, and his wine-loving proclivities, Dr. Arbuthnot became sick and poor, and died in straitened circumstances.
Another Poor Pedagogue,
Who reached the acme of medical fame, and became court physician, was Sir Richard Blackmer. He surely ought not to have been called an ignoramus (by Dr. Johnson), for he resided thirteen years in the University of Oxford. After leaving Oxford, his extreme poverty compelled him to adopt the profession of a schoolmaster. In the year 1700 there were collected upwards of forty sets of ribald verses, under the title of “Commendary Verses, or the Author of Two Arthurs, and Satyr against Wit;” in which Sir Richard was taunted with his earlier poverty, and of having been a pedagogue!
Every man has his advertisement and his advertisers. The poets and lampooners were Blackmer’s. They assisted in bringing him into notoriety. Among them were Pope, Steele, and the obscene Dr. Garth. While the authors of those filthy, licentious productions (which no bar-maid or kitchen-scullion at this day could read without blushing behind her pots and kettles) were flattering themselves that they were injuring the honest doctor, they were bringing him daily into the notice of better men than themselves, and heaping ignominy upon the authors of such vile lampoons.