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 physick, 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.
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 a 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 every-day writer."
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 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 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, 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 awhile
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 terrour is
rational, and whose is ridiculous; who is to be pitied, and who to be
despised. Both are for awhile equally exposed to laughter, but both are
not, therefore, equally contemptible.
In the revisal of his poem, though he died before he had finished it,
he omitted the lines which had given occasion to Warburton's objections.
He published, soon after his return from Levden, 1745, his first
collection of odes; and was impelled, by his rage of patriotism, to
write 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 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 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 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 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[195]
Akenside appears not to have been wanting to his own success: he placed
himself in view by all the common methods; he became a fellow of the
Royal Society; he obtained a degree at Cambridge; and was admitted into
the College of Physicians; he wrote little poetry, but published, from
time to time, medical essays and observations; he became physician to
St. Thomas's hospital; he read the Gulstonian lectures in anatomy; but
began to give, for the Crounian 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[196].
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
very amply satisfied. It has undoubtedly a just claim to very particular
notice, as an example of great felicity of genius, and uncommon
amplitude of acquisitions, of a young mind stored with images, and much
exercised in combining and comparing them.
With the philosophical or religious tenets of the author, I have nothing
to do; my business is with his poetry. The subject is well chosen, as it
includes all images that can strike or please, and thus comprises every
species of poetical delight. The only difficulty is in the choice of
examples and illustrations; and it is not easy, in such exuberance of
matter, to find the middle point between penury and satiety. The parts
seem artificially disposed, with sufficient coherence, so as that they
cannot change their places without injury to the general design.
His images are displayed with such luxuriance of expression, that they
are hidden, like Butler's Moon, by a "veil of light;" they are forms
fantastically lost under superfluity of dress. "Pars minima est ipsa
puella sui." The words are multiplied till the sense is hardly
perceived; attention deserts the mind, and settles in the ear. The
reader wanders through the gay diffusion, sometimes amazed, and
sometimes delighted; but, after many turnings in the flowery labyrinth,
comes out as he went in. He remarked little, and laid hold on nothing.
To his versification, justice requires that praise should not be denied.
In the general fabrication of his lines he is, perhaps, superiour to any
other writer of blank verse: his flow is smooth, and his pauses are
musical; but the concatenation of his verses is commonly too long
continued, and the full close does not recur with sufficient frequency.
The sense is carried on through a long inter-texture of complicated
clauses, and, as nothing is distinguished, nothing is remembered.
The exemption which blank verse affords from the necessity of closing
the sense with the couplet, betrays luxuriant and active minds into such
self-indulgence, that they pile image upon image, ornament upon
ornament, and are not easily persuaded to close the sense at all. Blank
verse will, therefore, I fear, be too often found in description
exuberant, in argument loquacious, and in narration tiresome.
His diction is certainly poetical as it is not prosaick, and elegant as
it is not vulgar. He is to be commended as having fewer artifices of
disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song. He rarely either
recalls old phrases, or twists his metre into harsh inversions. The
sense, however, of his words is strained, when "he views the Ganges from
Alpine heights;" that is, from mountains like the Alps: and the pedant
surely intrudes, (but when was blank verse without pedantry?) when he
tells how "planets _absolve_ the stated round of time."
It is generally known to the readers of poetry that he intended to
revise and augment this work, but died before he had completed his
design. The reformed work as he left it, and the additions which he had
made, are very properly retained in the late collection. He seems to
have somewhat contracted his diffusion; but I know not whether he has
gained in closeness what he has lost in splendour. In the additional
book, the Tale of Solon is too long.
One great defect of his poem is very properly censured by Mr. Walker,
unless it may be said, in his defence, that what he has omitted was not
properly in his plan. "His picture of man is grand and beautiful, but
unfinished. The immortality of the soul, which is the natural
consequence of the appetites and powers she is invested with, is
scarcely once hinted throughout the poem. This deficiency is amply
supplied by the masterly pencil of Dr. Young; who, like a good
philosopher, has invincibly proved the immortality of man, from the
grandeur of his conceptions, and the meanness and misery of his state;
for this reason, a few passages are selected from the Night Thoughts,
which, with those from Akenside, seem to form a complete view of the
powers, situation, and end of man." Exercises for Improvement in
Elocution, p. 66.
His other poems are now to be considered; but a short consideration will
despatch them. It is not easy to guess why he addicted himself so
diligently to lyrick poetry, having neither the ease and airiness of the
lighter, nor the vehemence and elevation of the grander ode. When he
lays his ill-fated hand upon his harp, his former powers seem to desert
him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression, nor variety of
images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant. Yet such was his
love of lyricks, that, having written, with great vigour and poignancy,
his Epistle to Curio, he transformed it afterwards into an ode
disgraceful only to its author.
Of his odes nothing favourable can be said; the sentiments commonly want
force, nature, or novelty; the diction is sometimes harsh and uncouth,
the stanzas ill-constructed and unpleasant, and the rhymes dissonant, or
unskilfully disposed, too distant from each other, or arranged with too
little regard to established use, and, therefore, perplexing to the ear,
which, in a short composition, has not time to grow familiar with an
innovation.
To examine such compositions singly cannot be required; they have,
doubtless, brighter and darker parts; but, when they are once found to
be generally dull, all further labour may be spared: for to what use can
the work be criticised that will not be read?
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[Footnote 195: Johnson entertained a very high idea of the varied
learning and science necessarily connected with the character of an
accomplished physician, and often affirmed of the physicians of this
island, that "they did more good to mankind without a prospect of
reward, than any profession of men whatever." His friendship for Dr.
Bathurst, and the most eminent men in the medical line of his day, is
well known. See an epistle to Dr. Percival, developing the wide field of
knowledge over which a physician should expatiate, prefixed to
Observations on the Literature of the Primitive Christian Writers. ED.]
[Footnote 196: A most curious and original character of Akenside is
given by George Hardinge, in vol. viii. of Nichols's Literary Anecdotes.
ED.]