AKENSIDE. 1721-1770. Born at Newcastle-on-Tyne-Educated at Edinburgh and Leyden-Determines to study Physic -Publishes 'The Pleasures of Imagination '—His Quarrel with Warburton-Writes a Poem against Pulteney-Publishes a volume of Odes-Mr. Dyson's friendship for him-His small practice as a Physician-Death, and Burial in St. James's Church, Piccadilly, London. MARK AKENSIDE was born on the 9th of November, 1721, at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His father Mark was a butcher, of the Presbyterian sect; his mother's name was Mary Lumsden.' He received the first part of his education at the grammar-school of Newcastle, and was afterwards instructed by Mr. Wilson, who kept a private academy. At the age of eighteen he was sent to Edinburgh, that he might qualify himself for the office of a dissenting minister, and received some assistance from the fund which the Dissenters employ in educating young men of scanty fortune. But a wider view of the world opened other scenes and prompted other hopes he determined to study physic, and repaid that contribution, which, being received for a different purpose, he justly thought it dishonourable to retain. Whether, when he resolved not to be a dissenting minister, he ceased to be a Dissenter, I know not. He certainly retained an unnecessary and outrageous zeal for what he called and thought liberty; a zeal which sometimes disguises from the world, and not 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." 1 "1710, August 10.-Mark Akenside and Mary Lumsden. Mar."-Register of St. Nicholas, Newcastle. ( Biographical Notice of Akenside,' by Robert White, p. 1.) His father wrote his name Akinside, and so did his son till he became distinguished. "Akenside, when a student at Edinburgh, was a member of the Medical Society, then 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 1744. 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, 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 everyday writer." In 1741 he went to Leyden in pursuit of medical knowledge, and three years afterwards (May 16, 1744) became doctor of physic, recently formed, and was eminently distinguished by the eloquence which he displayed in the course of the debates. Dr. Robertson (who was at that time a student of divinity in the same university) told me that he was frequently led to attend their meetings chiefly to hear the speeches of Akenside, the great object of whose ambition then was a seat in Parliament; a situation which he was sanguine enough to flatter himself he had some prospect of obtaining, and for which he conceived his talents to be much better adapted than for the profession he had chosen. In this opinion he was probably in the right, as he was generally considered by his fellow-students as far inferior in medical science to several of his companions.-DUGALD STEWART: Elem, of the Phil. of the Human Mìn1, iii. 501. He was very young when he became a poet in print, many of his boyish verses appearing in the pages of The Gentleman's Magazine.' One of his first attempts is in the number of that periodical for April, 1787, and is called 'The Virtuoso, in imitation of Spenser's Style and Stanza.' The letter with which it was sent, signed "Marcus," pleads excuse for its defects, as "the performance of one in his sixteenth year." This is not a common poem; but it is very unlike the style, though written in the stanza, of Spenser. Akenside's next communication was in the August of 1788; A British Philippic, occasioned by the Insults of the Spaniards, and the present Preparations for War.' This noble-spirited poem, as it is called by Sylvanus Urban, is too near an echo of the Britannia' of Thomson; but it is no everyday cento; and so it was thought by Cave, who printed it at the same time in a sixpenny folio. "If the ingenious author," says Cave, "will inform us how we may direct a packet to his hands, we will send him our acknowledgments for so great a favour with a parcel of the folio edition." • The poem appeared anonymously; and a scribbler of the name of Rolt went over to Dublin, published an edition of it as his own work, and lived for some months at the best tables on the fame which it brought him. (See Boswell by Croker, p. 121.) Akenside vindicated his right by publishing an edition with his name. • What was thought of the new poet and his poem by some men of genius of the time is painful to tell. Three have left their opinions in writing. Gray thought it above mediocrity, now and then rising to the best, particularly in description; that it was often obscure, and at times unintelligible. "I have read The Pleasures of Imagination,' ," writes Ambrose Philips; "there are in it frequent obscurities and it glares too much " "There is a poem of this season," writes Shenstone," "called 'The Pleasures of Imagination,' worth your reading, but is is an expensive quarto: if it comes out in a less size, I will bring it home with me." baving, 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 Foetus; in which he is said to have departed, with great judgment, 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," and by an eccentricity which such dispositions do not easily avoid, a lover of contradiction, and no friend to anything established. He adopted Shaftesbury's foolish assertion of the efficacy of ridicule for the discovery 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 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. 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 ridiculouswho 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, which he died before he had finished, he omitted the lines which had given occasion to Warburton's objections. He published, soon after his return from Leyden (1745), his first collection of odes; and was impelled by his rage of patriotism to • Smollett ridiculed him (1751) in 'Peregrine Pickle,' as the republican doctor; the purveyor of the inimitable dinner in the manner of the ancients. To complete the likeness, he has made him quote himself. (Compare 'Per. Pickle,' ii. 248, ed. 1751, and Akenside's note on his 'Ode to the Earl of Huntingdon.") ' Dyson's defence was an anonymous Epistle;' in which I think with Mr. Dyce, that thers is more of Akenside than Dyson. write [1744] a very acrimonious epistle to Pulteney, whom he stigmatizes, under the name of Curio, as the betrayer of his country." Being now to live by his profession, he first commenced [1744] physician at Northampton, where Dr. Stonehouse then practised, with such reputation and success, that a stranger was not likely to gain ground upon him. Akenside tried the contest awhile; and having deafened the place with clamours for liberty, removed [1747] 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. 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 exigencies, but that Mr. Dyson," with an ardour of friendship that has not many examples, allowed him three hundred pounds a-year. Thus supported, he advanced gradually in medical reputation, but never attained any great extent of practice, or eminence of popu • Akenside's share in Dodsley's Museum,' and the remuneration he received from Dodsley for his services in that work, have escaped his biographers. All that Mr. Dyce says on the subject is as follows:-" He also contributed to Dodsley's excellent periodical publication 'The Museum, or Literary and Historical Register,' several prose papers, which deserve to be reprinted." The following document is in Akenside's handwriting, and it is here printed from the original in my possession: Jany. 20, 1745-6. Dr. Akinside engages to Mr. Dodsley for six months, commencing the 25th of March next, To prepare and have ready for the press once a fortnight, one Essay, whenever necessary for carrying on a work to be called the Museum. And also To prepare and have ready for the press once a fortnight an account of the most consider able books in English, Latin, French, or Italian, which have been lately published, and which Mr. Dodsley shall furnish: and the said Account of Books shall be so much in quantity as along with the Essay above mentioned may fill a sheet and a half in small pica, whenever so much is necessary for carrying on the said design. Dr. Akinside also engages to supervise the whole, and to correct the press of his own part -On condition That Mr. Dodsley shall pay to Dr. Akinside fifty pounds on or before the 27th of September next. "Tis also agreed that so long as Mr. Dodsley thinks proper to continue the Paper, and so long as Dr. Akinside consents to manage it, the Terms above mentioned shall remain in force, and not less than an hundred pounds per annum be offered by Mr. Dodsley, nor more insisted on by Dr. Akinside, as witness our hands. • In Bloomsbury Square. MARK AKINSIDE. 10 Jeremiah Dyson, Esq., of Stoke, near Guildford, in Surrey, many years Secretary to the Treasury. Akenside obtained his acquaintance in Edinburgh, where Dyson was studying law, and Akenside was studying physic. He died Sept. 16, 1776. larity. 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 any 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.' Akenside appears not to have been wanting to his own success: he placed himself in view by all the common methods:" he became [1753] a Fellow of the Royal Society; he obtained a degree at Cambridge, and was admitted [1754] into the College of Physicians; he wrote little poetry, but published, from time to time, medical essays and observations; he became [1759] Physician to St. Thomas's Hospital; he read [1755] the Gulstonian Lectures in Anatomy; but began to give, for the Croonian Lecture, a history of the revival 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." His Discourse on the Dysentery (1764) was considered as a very conspicuous specimen of Latinity, 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." AKENSIDE is to be considered as a didactic and lyric poet. His 11 He was, it is said, somewhat harsh and unfeeling in his treatment of hospital patients, and made but little way either with the poor or the rich. 12 Of all our poets, perhaps, Akenside was the best Greek scholar since Milton. Jos. WAD TON: Essay on Pope, ii. 886, ed. 1782. 19 By his will, dated 6th December, 1767, he left his "whole estate and effects of whatever kind" to his friend Mr. Dyson. He died at his house in Burlington Street, and was buried in the church of St. James', Piccadilly; but his grave remains unmarked to this day. "That 'Akenside when he walked in the streets looked for all the world like one of his own Alexandrines set upright' was a saying of Henderson the actor, for which I am indebted to a true poet of our own day, Mr. Rogers, who heard it repeated many years ago."-DYCE: Appendix to his Life of Akenside. The only portrait of Akenside is a characteristic profile by Arthur Pond, drawn 1754, and engraved by E. Fisher, 1772. |