Poetical Works of Akenside by Mark Akenside (suggested reading TXT) 📕

himself in view by all the common methods." Had he been a thoroughly self-seeking man, he never would have committed the blunder of choosing literature as a subject of predilection to men who were probably most of them materialists, or at least destitute of literary taste. The Doctor says also, "He very eagerly forced himself into notice, by an ambitious ostentation of elegance and literature." But surely the author of such a popular poem as the "Pleasures of Imagination" had no need to claim notice by an ostentatious display of his parts, and had too much good sense to imagine that such a vain display would conciliate any acute and sensible person. Johnson, in fact, throughout his cursory and careless "Life of Akenside," is manifestly labouring under deep prejudice against the poet--prejudice founded chiefly on Akenside's political sentiments.

In 1759 our poet was appointed physician to St. Thomas's Hospital, and afterwards to Christ's Hospital. Here he ruled the patients and the under officials with a rod of iron. Dr. Lettsom became a surgeon's dresser in St. Thomas's Hospital. He was an admirer of poetry, especially of the "Pleasures of Imagination," and anticipated much delight from intercourse with the author. He was disappointed first of all with his personal appearance. He found him a stiff-limbed, starched personage, with a lame foot, a pale strumous face, a long sword, and a large white wig. Worse than this, he was cruel, almost barbarous, to the patients, particularly to females. Owing to an early love-disappointment, he had contracted a disgust and aversion to the sex, and chose to express it in a callous and cowardly harshness to those under his charge. It is possible, however, that Lettsom might be influenced by some private pique. Nothing is more common than for the hero-worshipper, disenchanted of his early idolatry, to rush to the opposite extreme, and to become the hero-hater; and the fault is as frequently his own as that of his idol. And it must be granted that an hospital--especially of that age--was no congenial atmosphere for a poet so Platonic and ideal as Akenside.

In October 1759 he delivered the Harveian oration before the College of Physicians, and by their order it was published the next year. In 1761 Mr. T. Hollis presented him with a bed which had once belonged to Milton, on the condition that he would write an ode to the memory of that great poet. Akenside joyfully accepted the bed, had it set up in his house, and, we suppose, slept in it; but the muse forgot to visit his "slumbers nightly," and no ode was ever produced. We think that Akenside had sympathy enough with Milton's politics and poetry to have written a fine blank-verse tribute to his memory, resembling that of Thomson to Sir Isaac Newton; but odes of much merit he could not produce, and yet at odes he was always sweltering

"With labour dire and weary woe."

In 1760, George the Third mounted the throne, and the author of the "Epistle to Curio" began to follow the precise path of Pulteney. In this he was preceded by Dyson, who became suddenly a supporter of Lord Bute, and drew his friend in his train. By Dyson's influence Akenside was appointed, in 1761, physician to the Queen. His secession from the Whig ranks cost him a great deal of obloquy. Dr. Hardinge had told the two turncoats long before "that, like a couple of idiots, they did not leave themselves a loophole--they could not sidle away into the opposite creed." He never, however, became a violent Tory partisan. It is singular how Johnson, with all his aversion to Akenside, has no allusion to his apostasy, in which we might have a priori expected him to glory, as a proof of the poet's inconsistency, if not corruption.

In one point Akenside differed from the majority of his tuneful brethren, before, then, or since. He was a warm and wide-hearted commender of the works of other poets. Most of our sweet singers rather resemble birds of prey than nightingales or doves, and are at least as strong in their talons as they are musical in their tongues. And hence the groves of Parnassus have in all ages rung with the screams of wrath and contest, frightfully mingling with the melodies of song. Akenside, by a felicitous conjunction of elements, which you could not have expected from other parts of his character, was entirely exempted from this defect, and not only warmly admired Pope, Young, Thomson, and Dyer, whose "Fleece" he corrected, but had kind words to spare for even such "small deer" as Welsted and Fenton.

In 1763, he read a paper before the Royal Society, on the "Effects of a Blow on the Heart," which was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the year. And, in 1764 he established his character as a medical writer by an elegant and elaborate treatise on "The Dysentery," still, we believe, consulted for its information, and studied for the purity and precision of its Latin style. About this time, too, he commenced a recasting of his "Pleasures of Imagination," which he did not live to finish; and in which, on the whole, there is more of laborious alteration than of felicitous improvement. In 1766, Warburton, his old foe, who had now been made a bishop, reprinted, in a new edition of his "Divine Legation of Moses," his attack on Akenside's notions about ridicule, without deigning to take any notice of the explanations he had given in his reply. This renewal of hostilities, coming, especially as it did, from the vantage ground of the Episcopal bench, enraged our poet, and, by way of rejoinder, he issued a lyrical satire which he had had lying past him in pickle for fifteen years, and which nothing but a fresh provocation would have induced him to publish. It was entitled "An Ode to the late Thomas Edwards, Esq." Edwards had opposed Warburton ably in a book entitled "Canons of Criticism," and was himself a poet. The real sting of this attack lay in Akenside's production of a letter from Warburton to Concanen, dated 2d January 1726, which had fallen accidentally into the hands of our poet; and in which Warburton had accused Addison of plagiarism, and said that when "Pope borrows it is from want of genius." Concanen was one of the "Dunces," and it was, of course, Akenside's purpose to shew Warburton's inconsistency in the different opinions he had expressed at different times of them and of their great adversary. We know not if the sturdy bishop took any notice of this ode. Even his Briarean arms were sometimes too full of the controversial work which his overbearing temper and fierce passions were constantly giving him.

In 1766, Akenside received the thanks of the College of Physicians for an edition of Harvey's works, which he prepared for the press, and to which he had prefixed a preface. In June 1767 he read before the College two papers, one on "Cancers and Asthmas," and the other on "White Swelling of the Joints," both of which were published the next year in the first volume of the Medical Transactions . In the same year, one Archibald Campbell, a Scotchman, a purser in the navy, and called, from his ungainly countenance, "horrible Campbell," produced a small jeu d'esprit , entitled "Lexiphanes, imitated from Lucian, and suited to the present times," in which he tries to ridicule Johnson's prose and Akenside's poetry. His object was probably to attract their notice, but both passed over this grin of the "Grim Feature" in silent contempt. Akenside was still busy with the revisal of his poem, had finished two books, "made considerable progress with the third, and written a fragment of the fourth;" but death stepped in and blighted his prospects, both as a physician, with increasing practice and reputation, and as a poet, whose favourite work was approaching what he deemed perfection. He was seized with putrid fever; and, after a short illness, died on the 23 d June 1770 at an age when many men are in their very prime, both of body and mind--that of 49. He died in his house in Burlington Street, and was buried on the 28th in St. James's Church.

Akenside had been, notwithstanding his many acquaintances and friends, on the whole, a lonely man; without domestic connexions, and having, so far as we are informed, either no surviving relations or no intercourse with those who might be still alive. He was not especially loved in society; he wanted humour and good-humour both, and had little of that frank cordiality which, according to Sidney Smith, "warms and cheers more than meat or wine." He had far less geniality than genius. Yet, in certain select circles, his mind, which was richly stored with all knowledge, opened delightfully, and men felt that he was the author of his splendid poem. One of his biographers gives him the palm for learning, next to Ben Jonson, Milton, and Gray (he might perhaps have also excepted Landor and Coleridge), over all our English poets.

In 1772, Mr. Dyson published an edition of his friend's poems, containing the original form of the "Pleasures of Imagination," as well as its half-finished second shape; his "Odes," "Inscriptions," "Hymn to the Naiads," etc., omitting, however, his poem to Curio in its first and best version, and some of his smaller pieces. This edition, too, contained an account of Akenside's life by his friend, so short and so cold as either to say little for Dyson's heart, or a great deal for his modesty and reticence. His uniform and munificent kindness to the poet during his lifetime, however, determines us in favour of the latter side of the alternative.

Of Akenside, as a man, our previous remarks have perhaps indicated our opinion. He was rather a scholar somewhat out of his element, and unreconciled to the world, than a thorough gentleman; irritable, vehement, and proud--his finer traits were only known to his intimates, who probably felt that in Wordsworth's words,

"You must love him ere to you
He doth, seem worthy of your love."

In religion his opinions seem to have been rather unsettled; but, of whatever doubts he had, he gave the benefit latterly to the Christian side--at least he was ever ready to rebuke noisy and dogmatic infidelity. It is said that he intended to have included the doctrine of immortality in his later version of the "Pleasures of Imagination"--and even as the poem is, it contains some transient allusions to that great object of human hope, although none, it must be admitted, to its special Christian grounds.

We have now a very few sentences to enounce about his poetry, or, more properly speaking, about his two or three good poems, for we must dismiss the most of his odes, in their deep-sounding dulness, as nearly unworthy of their author's genius. Up to the days of Keats' "Endymion" and "Hyperion," Akenside's "Hymn to the Naiads" was thought one of the best attempts to reproduce the classical spirit and ideas. It now takes a secondary place; and at no time could be compared to an actual hymn of Callimachus or Pindar, any more than Smollett's "Supper after the Manner of the Ancients" was equal to a real Roman Coena, the ideal of which Croly has so superbly described in "Salathiel." His "Epistle to Curio" is a masterpiece of vigorous composition, terse sentiment, and glowing invective. It gathers around Pulteney as a ring of fire round the scorpion, and leaves him writhing and shrivelled. Out of Dryden and Pope, it is perhaps the best satiric piece in our poetry.

Of the "Pleasures of Imagination," it is not necessary to say a great deal. A