delivered that which has been fince confirmed and received.

Akenfide was a young man, warm with every notion that by nature or accident had been connected with the found of liberty, and by an excentricity which fuch difpofitions do not eafily avoid, a lover of contradiction, and no friend to any thing established. He adopted Shaftesbury's foolish affertion of the efficacy of ridicule for the difcovery of truth. For this he was attacked by Warburton, and defended by Dyson: Warburton afterwards reprinted his remarks at the end of his dedication to the Freethinkers.

The result of all the arguments which have been produced in a long and eager

difcuffion of this idle queftion, may be eafily collected. If ridicule be applied to any pofition as the test of truth, it will then become a queftion whether fuch ridicule be juft; and this can only be decided by the application of truth, as the teft of ridicule. Two men, fearing, one a real and the other a fancied danger, will be for a while equally expofed to the inevitable confequences of cowardice, contemptuous cenfure, and ludicrous reprefentation; and the true ftate of both cafes must be known, before it can be decided whofe terror is rational, and whofe is ridiculous; who is to be pitied, and who to be defpifed.

In the revifal of his poem, which he died before he had finished, he omitted the lines which had given occafion to Warburton's objections.

He published, foon after his return from Leyden (1745), his firft collection of odes; and was impelled by his rage of patriotifin to write a very acrimonious epiftle to Pulteney, whom he ftigmatizes, under the name of Curio, as the betrayer of his country.

Being now to live by his profeffion, he first commenced physician at Northampton, where Dr. Stonehouse then practifed, with fuch reputation and fuccefs, that a ftranger was not likely to gain ground upon him. Akenfide tried the conteft awhile; and, having

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having deafened the place with clamours for liberty, removed to Hampstead, where he refided more than two years, and then fixed himself in London, the proper place for a man of accomplishments like his.

At London he was known as a poet, but was still to make his way as a phyfician; and would perhaps have been reduced to great exigencies, but that Mr. Dyfon, with an ardour of friendship that has not many examples, allowed him three hundred pounds a year. Thus fupported, he advanced gradually in medical reputation, but never attained any great extent of practice, or eminence of popularity. A phyfician in a great city feems to be the mere play

thing of Fortune; his degree of reputation is, for the most part, totally cafual: 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 tranfactions of the medical world for half a century, a very curious book might be written on the Fortune of Phyficians.

Akenfide appears not to have been wanting to his own fuccefs: he placed himself in view by all the common methods; he became a Fellow of the Royal Society; he obtained a degree at Çambridge, and was admitted into the College of Phyficians; he wrote little poetry, but published, from time to time, medical effays and obfervations;

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