9 He published, soon after his return from Leyden (1745), his first collection of odes; and was impelled by his rage of patriotism 2 to write a very acrimonious epistle to Pulteney, whom he stigmatizes, under the name of Curio, as the betrayer of his country.

10 Being now to live by his profession, he first commenced physician at Northampton 3, where Dr. Stonhouse then practised, with such reputation and success that a stranger was not likely to gain ground upon him. Akenside tried the contest a while; and, having deafened the place with clamours for liberty, removed to Hampstead, where he resided more than two years, and then fixed himself in London, the proper place for a man of accomplishments like his.

11 At London he was known as a poet, but was still to make his way as a physician; and would perhaps have been reduced to great exigences, but that Mr. Dyson, with an ardour of friendship that has not many examples, allowed him three hundred

▾ Odes on Several Subjects, price Is. 6d. Gent. Mag. 1745, p. 168.

2

Johnson at first wrote, 'rage for liberty.' Boswell's Johnson, iv. 56.

3 The writer in Biog. Brit. (i. 104 m.) was living in that town during Akenside's residence.

[Sir James Stonhouse, the wellknown physician and divine. Dict. Nat. Biog.]

5 Wordsworth wrote in 1837:-'I am not unfrequently a visitor on Hampstead Heath, and seldom pass by the entrance of Mr. Dyson's villa on Golder's Hill close by without thinking of the pleasure which Akenside often had there.' Wordsworth adds:He was fond of sitting in St. James's Park, with his eyes upon Westminster Abbey. Memoirs of Wordsworth, 1851, ii. 350. In his Odes, ii. 12, Akenside describes how at Golder's Hill his

'Musing footsteps rove Round the cool orchard or the sunny lawn.'

The place is now a public park.

6 Jeremiah Dyson, Secretary to the Treasury. Horace Walpole's Letters, iv. 59. Later on he was Cofferer to the Household. On March 23, 1774, Walpole wrote of Grenville's

bill for trying elections:-'It passed as rapidly as if it had been for a repeal of Magna Charta, brought in by Mr. Cofferer Dyson.' lb. vi. 68. 'He was supposed to have all the Journals of the House of Commons by heart.' Gent. Mag. 1776, p. 416.

Hawkins says that he and Akenside 'dwelt together at North End, Hampstead, during the summer, frequenting the Long Room and all Clubs and Assemblies of the inhabitants.' Dyson later on 'settled him in a small house in Bloomsbury Square, and enabled him to keep a chariot.' Hawkins's Johnson, p. 243.

In an early letter of Akenside's to Dyson is a passage which, had it been written later, would have been thought a parody of Boswell in his letters to Johnson-'I never think of my connection with you without being happier and better for the reflection. I enjoy, by means of it, a more animated, a more perfect relish of every social, of every natural pleasure. My own character, by means of it, is become an object of veneration and applause to myself.' Dyce, p. 19.

pounds a year. Thus supported he advanced gradually in medical reputation, but never attained any great extent of practice or eminence of popularity. A physician in a great city seems to be the mere plaything of Fortune; his degree of reputation is, for the most part, totally casual: they that employ him know not his excellence; they that reject him know not his deficience. By an acute observer, who had looked on the transactions of the medical world for half a century, a very curious book might be written on the Fortune of Physicians 1.

Akenside appears not to have been wanting to his own success: 12 he placed himself in view by all the common methods; he became a Fellow of the Royal Society; he obtained a degree at Cambridge 3, and was admitted into the College of Physicians'; he wrote little poetry, but published, from time to time, medical essays and observations 5; he became physician to St. Thomas's Hospital; he read the Gulstonian Lectures in Anatomy'; but began to give, for the Crounian Lecture3, a history of the revival

• Boswell's Johnson, i. 242 n.

In Gent. Mag. 1758, p. 523, is a notice of a paper by him in the Transactions.

3 6 'He was admitted by mandamus to the degree of Doctor in Physic.' Eng. Poets, lxiii. 204.

A mandamus lies to compel the admission of the party applying to academical degrees.' Blackstone's Comm. 1775, iii. 110.

I owe the following note to the kindness of Dr. W. Aldis Wright:'The last degree conferred by royal mandate was that of D.D. on G. E. L. Cotton, Bishop Designate of Calcutta. The date of the royal letter was March 9, 1858. By the Statutes which were signed on July 31, 1858, the power of conferring degrees which had previously been given in obedience to a royal mandate was transferred to the University. Akenside's signature. The date of his degree was Jan. 4, 1753.'

I saw

Mr. Falconer Madan, Sub-Librarian of the Bodleian, informs me that 'he thinks that at Oxford no degree was conferred by a naked mandamus, but that such degrees were cloaked under the disguise of a request, or advice, from the Chancellor of the University.'

In Clark's Register of the Univ. vol. ii. part 1, pp. 150, 151, instances are given of the non-compliance of the University with orders from Queen Elizabeth. Johnson's D.C.L. degree was conferred on a recommendation of the Chancellor, who was also Prime Minister. Boswell's Johnson, ii. 331. For a dispensation by mandamus to hold a Fellowship see ante, TICKELL, I n.

In 1754. Dyce, p. 42. 5 For a list of his medical writings see Biog. Brit. i. 107.

In March, 1759. Gent. Mag. 1759, p. 147. Dr. Lettsom (Boswell's Johnson, iii. 68; John. Misc. ii. 402), who was a student at the Hospital, is reported to have said that he was the most supercilious and unfeeling physician that he had hitherto known. Dyce, p. 49.

'A lectureship was founded by Theodore Goulston or Gulston, who died in 1632. 'These lectures have been annually delivered since 1639, to the great advantage of medicine in England.' Dict. Nat. Biog. Akenside lectured in 1755. Biog. Brit. i. 107.

8 The widow of William Croone or Croune, in accordance with her husband's intention, in 1706 left the

13

14

of Learning, from which he soon desisted; and, in conversation, he very eagerly forced himself into notice by an ambitious ostentation of elegance and literature 1.

His Discourse on the Dysentery (1764) was considered as a very conspicuous specimen of Latinity 2, which entitled him to the same height of place among the scholars as he possessed before among the wits; and he might perhaps have risen to a greater elevation of character, but that his studies were ended with his life by a putrid fever, June 23, 1770, in the forty-ninth year of his age3.

AKENSIDE is to be considered as a didactick and lyrick poet. His great work is The Pleasures of Imagination, a performance which, published as it was at the age of twenty-three, raised expectations that were not afterwards very amply satisfied. It has undoubtedly a just claim to very particular notice as an

College of Physicians by her will money to support an annual lectureship. Dict. Nat. Biog. Akenside lectured in 1756. According to Kippis in Biog. Brit. (i. 107), 'he gave up the course in disgust,' as some objected to the subject as 'foreign to the institution.' Mr. Dyce points out (p. 45) that 'the course is always of three lectures, and three he gave.'

He was the original of the physician in Peregrine Pickle, chs. 42-3, who was 'a young man in whose air and countenance appeared all the uncouth gravity and supercilious selfconceit of a physician piping hot from his studies.... Not contented with displaying his importance in the world of taste and polite literature, his vanity manifested itself in arrogating certain material discoveries in the province of physick.'

Hawkins, allowing that his conversation was of the most delightful kind,' says that he failed through 'the want of that quality which Swift somewhere calls an aldermanly virtue, discretion.' Hawkins's Johnson, pp. 242, 247. Swift, in his Essay on the Fates of Clergymen, attributes the fall of such men as Bacon, Strafford and Laud to their wanting a reasonable infusion of this aldermanly discretion.' Works, viii. 222.

Henderson, the actor (Boswell's Johnson, ii. 326n., iv. 244 n.), said that 'Akenside, when he walked in the streets, looked for all the world like one of his own Alexandrines set upright.' Dyce, p. 76. See also ib. p. 55, and John. Letters, ii. 21 n.

2 De Dysenteria Commentarius. In Gent. Mag. 1766, p. 489, is announced A Commentary on the Dysentery from the Latin of Dr. Akenside. By J. Ryan, M.D.

'Of all our poets perhaps Akenside was the best Greek scholar since Milton.' WARTON, Essay on Pope, ii. 455.

3 His death is noticed neither in Gent. Mag. nor in Ann. Reg. For Shenstone's death by the same fever see ante, SHENSTONE, 15.

4

Gray wrote of it on April 26, 1744: It seems to me above the middling, and now and then (but for a little while) rises even to the best, particularly in description. It is often obscure and even unintelligible, and too much infected with the Hutcheson-jargon. In short its great fault is that it was published at least nine years too early. Gray's Letters, i. 119. According to Norton Nicholls, 'Gray disliked Akenside, and in general all poetry in blank verse except Milton.' Ib. ii. 280.

example of great felicity of genius and uncommon amplitude of acquisitions, of a young mind stored with images, and much exercised in combining and comparing them.

With the philosophical or religious tenets of the author I have 15 nothing to do; my business is with his poetry. The subject is well chosen, as it includes all images that can strike or please, and thus comprises every species of poetical delight. The only difficulty is in the choice of examples and illustrations, and it is not easy in such exuberance of matter to find the middle point between penury and satiety. The parts seem artificially disposed, with sufficient coherence, so as that they cannot change their places without injury to the general design.

His images are displayed with such luxuriance of expression 16 that they are hidden, like Butler's Moon, by a 'Veil of Light''; they are forms fantastically lost under superfluity of dress. 'Pars minima est ipsa puella sui2.' The words are multiplied till the sense is hardly perceived; attention deserts the mind and settles in the ear. The reader wanders through the gay diffusion, sometimes amazed and sometimes delighted; but after many turnings in the flowery labyrinth comes out as he went in. He remarked little, and laid hold on nothing 3.

To his versification justice requires that praise should not be 17 denied. In the general fabrication of his lines he is perhaps superior to any other writer of blank verse; his flow is smooth and his pauses are musical, but the concatenation of his verses is commonly too long continued, and the full close does not recur with sufficient frequency. The sense is carried on through a long intertexture of complicated clauses, and as nothing is distinguished, nothing is remembered.

The exemption which blank verse affords from the necessity of 18 closing the sense with the couplet, betrays luxuriant and active minds into such self-indulgence that they pile image upon image, ornament upon ornament, and are not easily persuaded to close the sense at all 5. Blank verse will therefore, I fear, be too often

found in description exuberant, in argument loquacious, and in narration tiresome.

19 His diction is certainly poetical as it is not prosaick, and elegant as it is not vulgar'. He is to be commended as having fewer artifices of disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song2. He rarely either recalls old phrases or twists his metre into harsh inversions. The sense, however, of his words is strained; when 'he views the Ganges from Alpine heights 3,' that is, from mountains like the Alps. And the pedant surely intrudes—but when was blank verse without pedantry?—when he tells how 'Planets absolve the stated round of Time'.'

20 It is generally known to the readers of poetry that he intended to revise and augment this work, but died before he had completed his design 5. The reformed work as he left it, and the additions which he had made, are very properly retained in the late collection". He seems to have somewhat contracted his diffusion; but I know not whether he has gained in closeness what he has lost in splendour. In the additional book The Tale of Solon is too long?.

21

One great defect of his poem is very properly censured by

which would extend itself too far on every subject, did not the labour which is required to well-turned and polished rhyme set bounds to it.' Neander replies:-Verse is a rule and line by which the master-workman keeps his building compact and even, which otherwise lawless imagination would raise either irregularly or loosely.' Works, xv. 360, 376.

In the first edition :-'His diction is certainly so far poetical as it is not prosaick, and so far valuable as it is not common.'

2' Of Dodsley's Publick Virtue Johnson said, "It was fine blank" (meaning to express his usual contempt for blank verse).' Boswell's Johnson, iv. 20. See also ante, MILTON, 274.

3 'Who that from Alpine heights his
labouring eye

Shoots round the wide horizon, to
survey

Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright
wave.'
Bk. i. 1. 177.

In the revised version :

-