Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 01.djvu/224

Akenside his beautiful ‘Hymn to the Naiads,’ perhaps the most elegant of his writings, and certainly the latest that was of any transcendent merit. In January of the same year he had become editor of Dodsley's magazine, the ‘Museum,’ to which he contributed a large number of essays in prose; and after the expiration of this work, although he occasionally published a pamphlet in prose or verse, he gave himself almost entirely to his profession. He steadily rose to eminence as a physician. In January 1753, he was admitted by mandamus to a doctor's degree at Cambridge, and was in the same year elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; in April 1754, he was admitted a Fellow of the College of Physicians, and in September of the following year was elected fourth censor of the college, and delivered the Gulstonian Lectures. These were printed in the ‘Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1757.’ In 1756 he read the Croonian Lectures before the same college, taking as his subject the eccentrically inappropriate one of the ‘Revival of Learning.’ In 1757 he had the want of discretion to sit down to remodel the charming poem of his youth, ‘The Pleasures of Imagination,’ which he would have done better to leave alone. In March 1758 he published an ‘Ode to the Country Gentlemen of England,’ and in the same year contributed a large number of new pieces, including the ‘Hymn to the Naiads,’ to the sixth volume of Dodsley's popular ‘Miscellany.’ The ‘Call to Aristippus’ is another pamphlet in verse, published in 1758. In January 1759, Akenside was appointed assistant physician, and, in March of the same year, principal physician, to Christ's Hospital. It is sad to be obliged to record that even in those lax days Akenside shocked his contemporaries by his brutal roughness and cruelty to the poor. His learning and sagacity were only just sufficient, on more than one occasion, to preserve him from dismissal upon this ground. In 1761 he was appointed one of the physicians to the queen, and scandalised the whigs, of which party he had hitherto always been a strenuous supporter, by promptly becoming a tory. He had moved into a house in Craven Street, but in 1760 he took one in Burlington Street, and there he resided until his death. The last years of his life were marked by no other incidents than the publication of an occasional ode or dissertation. His practice had become very large and fashionable, when he was seized by a putrid fever, under which, after a very short illness, he sank on June 23, 1770, at the age of forty-eight years and six months. He is said to have expired in the bed in which Milton died, a bed which a friend had given to Akenside nine years before. He was buried on 28 June in the church of St. James's.

Akenside's principal contribution to English literature, ‘The Pleasures of Imagination,’ is a didactic poem of two thousand lines of blank verse, divided into three books. The first book deals with the origin of those intellectual qualities which combine to form imagination, the enjoyment which is caused by the exercise of these in perception and invention, and the different degrees of beauty which are evolved by them in the conduct of life and the study of nature. In the second book, imagination is distinguished from philosophy, the accidental pleasures which enhance the former are enumerated, and the action of the passions upon imagination is described in an allegorical vision. The third and final book discourses on the pleasure of observing the manners of mankind, inquiries into the origin of vice, and describes the action of the mind when engaged in producing works of the imagination. The poem concludes with an account of the advantages accruing from a well-formed imagination.

In the posthumous form, the poem is revised and slightly amplified, while a fragment of a fourth book is added.

The following are the publications of Akenside which have not been enumerated above: 1. ‘An Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Warburton,’ 1744. 2. ‘Dissertatio de Ortu et Incremento Fœtus Humani,’ Leyden, 1744. 3. ‘Ode to the Earl of Huntingdon,’ 1748. 4. ‘The Remonstrance of Shakespeare,’ 1749. 5. ‘De Dysenteria Commentarius,’ 1764. 6. ‘Ode to the late Thomas Edwards,’ 1766.

Of collected editions of Akenside's poems the first was published by Dyson, his executor, in one quarto volume in 1772; the best is that edited by the Rev. Alexander Dyce in 1834. It has been usual to print the ‘Pleasures of Imagination’ in both forms, giving the original text of 1744 and the posthumous revision of 1772.

A contemporary has left this portrait of the poet-physician: ‘One leg of Dr. Akenside was considerably shorter than the other, which was in some measure remedied by the aid of a false heel. He had a pale strumous countenance, but was always very neat and elegant in his dress. He wore a large white wig, and carried a long sword. He would order the servants (at Christ's Hospital), on his visiting days, to precede him with brooms to clear the way, and prevent the patients from too nearly approaching him.’

[Life in Johnson's Lives of the Poets; Life prefixed to the Works by Mrs. Barbauld in 1808; Life, Writings, and Genius of Akenside, by Chas.