Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 01.djvu/223

Akenside solitary Wensbeck's limpid stream,’ the plan of this great work originally occurred to him. A poem called ‘A British Philippic,’ with which Akenside favoured the tory patriotism of the readers of the August number of the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ in the same year, was called for so eagerly that it was separately published in the form of a folio pamphlet, and this was Akenside's first independent publication. It appears that the young man was regarded with some pride by the dissenters of Newcastle, and that he was sent, at their expense, in 1739, to Edinburgh, to study for the ministry. After spending one winter, however, in theology, he abandoned it, and became a medical student. On taking this step he had the rectitude to repay to the dissenters of Newcastle what they had expended on him; it is not explained by what means he obtained the money needful to do this. It seems that with this change in his life he lost all personal interest in religious inquiry. He was elected a member of the Medical Society of Edinburgh 30 Dec. 1740, at the very early age of nineteen, his mind showing the same brilliant readiness in science that it had shown in literature. His eloquence at the meetings of the society was the subject of remark, and the young man began to aspire to a parliamentary career. His mind, however, was rapid and precocious rather than original, and neither in rhetoric, nor even in medicine, did he fulfil the promise of his boyhood. In 1740 he privately printed a pamphlet of verse, containing an ode, ‘On the Winter Solstice,’ and an elegy entitled ‘Love.’ In 1741 he returned to Newcastle, and is believed to have practised there for two years as a surgeon; more busy, however, during the early part of that time, in the composition of his great didactic poem. At twenty-one this butcher's son was already a person of much consideration, with a history behind him. When he came up to London, towards the close of 1743, with the finished manuscript of the ‘Pleasures of Imagination,’ he found the literary world prepared to welcome him. He offered his poem to Dodsley, with an intimation that the price was 120l. Before accepting such terms Dodsley showed the manuscript to Pope, who encouraged him to secure the poem, ‘since,’ he added, ‘this is no everyday writer.’ It was published by Dodsley in January 1744, and was received with great applause, though Gray slighted it, and Warburton attacked it. A cheap edition followed within four months, and announced for the first time the author's name, the credit of the piece having been claimed by an impostor of the name of Rolt. Leaving in the press a Parthian arrow in prose, destined for the breast of Warburton, Akenside left England early in April 1744, to proceed to Leyden, where he was presently joined by two Edinburgh friends, with whom he made the tour of Holland. Returning to Leyden, he buried himself among medical books, and struck up a close acquaintance with the eccentric and learned botanist, Gronovius. With his customary rapidity and power of concentration, Akenside completed his necessary studies in Holland within a month, and on 16 May 1744 took his degree of doctor of physic at Leyden. At the same time he published in Leyden, in the form of a quarto pamphlet, a medical dissertation in which he contested the authority of the famous Antony van Leeuwenhoek with considerable spirit and plausibility. He immediately returned to England, and in June of the same year took a physician's practice at Northampton. Here he formed the friendship of Dr. Philip Doddridge; but in all other respects, social and financial, found his prospects so very inauspicious, that in the winter of 1745 he returned to London. His stay at Northampton, however, was fertile in a literary respect, for he published two of his more remarkable works while he was there, his ‘Epistle to Curio’ in November 1744, and his ‘Odes on several Subjects’ in March 1745. Under the pseudonym of ‘Curio,’ the former of these works was a very spirited attack on William Pulteney for his recantation of liberal politics; the other volume was a collection of ten somewhat stiff and frigid lyrics, in the school of Gray and Collins, remarkable for the exact finish of their metrical structure. By this time, at the age of only twenty-four, Akenside had achieved a wide reputation as a poet, and had already written the one other work which was to sustain that reputation. The faults of his intellect and his character now began to reveal themselves. He became mentally fossilised by pedantry and conceit, and he gave way to a native tendency to arrogance, which grew to be a great disadvantage to him. From Christmas 1745 to the winter of 1747, Akenside was practising as a physician at North End, Hampstead, but without much success. An old friend of his, however, Jeremiah Dyson, who had a great affection for Akenside, lifted him out of all embarrassment with a generosity that was almost unexampled. He fitted up for the poet a handsome house in Bloomsbury Square, allowed him 300l. a year and a chariot, and busied himself to gain him so considerable a practice that Akenside was not merely well to do, but ‘lived incomparably well.’ This prosperity was fatal to his poetical genius. In 1746 he had written Rh