rarely from the mind which it possesses, an envious desire of plundering wealth or degrading greatness; and of which the immediate tendency is innovation and anarchy, an impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very little care what shall be established.

4 Akenside was one of those poets who have felt very early the motions of genius, and one of those students who have very early stored their memories with sentiments and images. Many of his performances were produced in his youth'; and his greatest work, The Pleasures of Imagination, appeared in 17442. I have heard Dodsley, by whom it was published, relate that when the copy was offered him the price demanded for it, which was an hundred and twenty pounds 3, being such as he was not inclined to give precipitately, he carried the work to Pope, who, having looked into it, advised him not to make a niggardly offer; for 'this was no every-day writer.'

5

6

In 1741 he went to Leyden in pursuit of medical knowledge *; and three years afterwards (May 16, 1744) became doctor of physick, having, according to the custom of the Dutch Universities, published a thesis, or dissertation. The subject which he chose was The Original and Growth of the Human Fætus 5, in which he is said to have departed, with great judgement, from the opinion then established, and to have delivered that which has been since confirmed and received.

Akenside was a young man, warm with every notion that by nature or accident had been connected with the sound of liberty,

Poets, Preface, p. 5. For the change in politics of Dyson and Akenside see Dyce, p. 52.

In Biog. Brit. i. 105, instances are given of the suppression of some republican sentiments in a later edition of his early poems.

I Verses by him appeared in Gent. Mag. 1737, pp. 244, 309, 441; 1738, P. 427; 1739, P. 544. See Dyce, Preface, p. 2.

2 Gent. Mag. 1744, p. 56, price 4s. The title was borrowed from Addison. Ante, ADDISON, 80. It was published anonymously. According to Johnson Richard Rolt 'went over to Ireland, published an edition of it, and put his own name to it. Upon the fame of this he lived for several

months, being entertained at the best tables as "the ingenious Mr. Rolt." Boswell's Johnson, i. 359.

3 According to Nichols, guineas. Swift, Works, 1803, xviii. 320 n. Dodsley made a good bargain; 'the demand for several successive republications was so quick' as not to give the poet time 'in any of the intervals to complete the whole of his corrections.' Eng. Poets, lxiii. 201.

He went there in the spring of 1744. Dyce, p. 16. Goldsmith went ten years later as a student of medicine. Forster's Goldsmith, 1871, i.

and by an excentricity which such dispositions do not easily avoid, a lover of contradiction, and no friend to any thing established. He adopted Shaftesbury's foolish assertion of the efficacy of ridicule for the discovery of truth'. For this he was attacked by Warburton 2, and defended by Dyson 3: 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 7 a long and eager discussion of this idle question may easily be collected. If ridicule be applied to any position as the test of truth, it will then become a question whether such ridicule be just; and this can only be decided by the application of truth as the test of ridicule 5. Two men fearing, one a real and the other a fancied danger, will be for a while equally exposed to the inevitable consequences of cowardice, contemptuous censure, and ludicrous representation; and the true state of both cases must be known before it can be decided whose terror is rational and whose is ridiculous, who is to be pitied and who to be despised. Both are for a while equally exposed to laughter, but both are not therefore equally contemptible".

In the revisal of his poem, though he died before he had 8 finished it, he omitted the lines which had given occasion to Warburton's objections 3.

Warburton's edition of Pope's Works, entitled An Ode to Thomas Edwards (Eng. Poets, lxiv. 92), with an account of Warburton's letter to Concanen (ante, POPE, 186). Biog. Brit. i. 104.

5 When Johnson chose,' writes Murphy, 'by apt illustration to place the argument of his adversary in a ludicrous light, one was almost inclined to think ridicule the test of truth.' John. Misc. i. 452.

'Cheats can seldom stand long against laughter.' Ante, BUTLER, 48. This last sentence is not in the first edition.

7

[In the three editions of the Lives published in Johnson's lifetime:which he died before he had finished.']

8 Post, AKENSIDE, 20. The lines remained the same (with one or two corrections), though transferred from Bk. iii. 259-77 to Bk. ii. 523-41.

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 n.) 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, Ákenside 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.' Ib. 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. I saw Akenside's signature. The date of his degree was Jan. 4, 1753.

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.

Gent. Mag.

In March, 1759. 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

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.

13 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 age 3.

14 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.'

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.' . ii. 280.