in Wordsworth and many modern painters-may be exemplified from any page of The Seasons. Miltonic too is the frequent Latinism of constructions like these: Bids his driving sleets Deform the day delightless;1 Winds and waters flowed In consonance. Such were those prime of days.2 Or the absolute use of participles, such as: Increasing still the terrors of these storms, His jaws horrific armed with three-fold fate, He goes beyond Milton in the use of inversions, which sometimes make his sense obscure, e.g. :— Or : On whose luxuriant herbage, half concealed, Crowned with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf where it is obviously meant, contrary to the grammar, that Autumn is crowned with the sickle and sheaf. With Milton's manner Thomson very skilfully blends the didactic vein of John Philips, as in the passage describing the husbandman destroying the plague of insects in Spring : To check this plague the skilful farmer chaff Or scatters o'er the blooms the pungent dust Or when the envenomed leaf begins to curl With sprinkled water drowns them in their nest ; 1 The Seasons: Spring, 20-21. 3 Ibid. Summer, 1013-1015. Ibid. Autumn, 1-4. 2 Ibid. Spring, 269-270. Many of the poetical qualities that shine in The Seasons are reproduced in The Pleasures of the Imagination; but they appear there in a more abstract and philosophic form. The poetry of The Seasons is largely inherent in the subject, but in the later poem, as in the series of didactic compositions by other poets that followed it— The Pleasures of Hope and The Pleasures of Memory—the treatment depends almost entirely on the genius of the author, and this offers a vivid contrast to the indolent, good-natured, and unambitious character of Thomson. Mark Akenside was the son of a butcher at Newcastleupon-Tyne. He was born there on the 9th of November 1721, and was educated partly at the Grammar School of the town, partly at a private school kept by a Mr. Wilson, a dissenting minister, from whose care he was sent, at the age of eighteen, to the University of Edinburgh, to study Nonconformist theology. As was the case with Thomson, this proved irksome to him, and after a short experience he turned his attention to medicine. Like Thomson also he had begun to write verse at an early age indeed it is said that The Pleasures of the Imagination was written before he went to Edinburgh. At the University he lived much in literary society, and wrote there his Ode on the Winter Solstice. Leaving Edinburgh for Leyden in 1741, he studied medicine for three years in that University, and formed a strong friendship with Jeremiah Dyson, afterwards Secretary to the Treasury, who was studying Civil Law in the same place. He took his degree of Doctor in Physic on 16th May 1744, and in his inaugural discourse De ortu et incremento fætus humani displayed much scientific ability in attacking the opinions prevailing on that subject, as well as in maintaining an hypothesis of his own. In the year before he had offered to Dodsley his Pleasures of Imagination, asking for it £120. The publisher, being somewhat startled at the price, consulted Pope, who advised him to accept the venture, "as this was no everyday poet." The poem proved very successful; but being inspired throughout by the Deistical Characteristics of Shaftesbury-called by Akenside "the noble restorer of ancient philosophy"-it incurred the hostility of Warburton, who attacked it severely in a postscript to his "Dedication to the Free-Thinker " prefixed to The Divine Legation. This was the origin of Akenside's dislike to Warburton, which appears so strongly in his Ode to Thomas Edwardes, Esquire, on the late Edition of Mr. Pope's Works. Akenside, like many of the literary physicians of the eighteenth century, was a vehement Whig, whose political opinions indeed seem to have carried him far towards Republicanism. He sympathised with the Whig element in the Parliamentary Opposition which attacked Walpole for his tame foreign policy, and, soon after his return to England in 1744, he published his bitter Epistle to Curio against Pulteney, who (as may be seen from many allusions in Pope's Satires) was then in special disfavour with this faction, as being a deserter from their cause. He also carried his politics into his profession, to his own detriment, and after attempting without success to obtain a practice as a physician in Northampton, he was forced to leave that town and to try his fortune in London, where he was most generously supported by his friend Dyson. Towards the end of his life Akenside became a Tory. He seems to have attained in medicine a position of some distinction, for he was in time elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, received by "mandamus" the degree of Doctor in Physic from the University of Cambridge, was appointed Physician to St. Thomas's Hospital, Fellow of the College of Physicians, Gulstonian Lecturer, and finally Physician to Queen Charlotte. He also published many medical treatises, one of which, Dissertatio de Dysenteria, was celebrated as a specimen of pure Latinity. His classical scholarship indeed was constantly intruding upon his sphere of practice, and when Cronian Lecturer he took for his subject the History of the Revival of Learning, but dropped it in consequence of the objection made by members of the College of Physicians, that it did not fall within the objects of the institution. In his practice as a physician he was doubtless in jured by his own aggressive temper. A regular frequenter of Tom's Coffee - House in Devereux Court, he became notorious for the bitterness of his political and literary disputes, which on one occasion nearly involved him in a duel with a certain Counsellor Ballow: this is said by Sir John Hawkins to have been only prevented by the impracticable resolutions of the two would-be combatants, of whom one would not fight in the morning nor the other in the evening.1 After the publication of The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and Odes on Several Subjects (1745), his poetical compositions seem to have been quite occasional. Recognising that his earliest work was immature, he occupied himself with recasting it, but left the new form incomplete. From time to time he was inspired to write by passing events, which roused his Whig sympathies. In 1747 the political situation prompted him, in an Ode to the Earl of Huntingdon, to review the triumphs of English Liberty in 1749 he evoked the spirit of Shakespeare to remonstrate against the invasion of the stage by a troop of French comedians; the old dissenting tradition animated in 1754 an ode to the aged and latitudinarian Bishop Hoadly he issued in 1758 a poetical address To the Country Gentlemen of England, as a protest against the Tory tradition of non-intervention in Continental politics : Say then, if England's youth in earlier days Though Valois braved young Edward's gentle hand, Yet not on Vere's bold archers long they looked, Nor Audley's squires, nor Mowbray's yeomen brooked : Though The Pleasures of Imagination was coloured by the Deistical opinions of Shaftesbury, Akenside protested against the principles of Atheism professed by Frederick of Prussia in his Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg. Addressing (1751) the spirits of the great statesmen of antiquity, he exclaims: 1 Anderson's Poets of Great Britain, vol. ix. "Life of Akenside." Ye godlike shades of legislators old, Ye who made Rome victorious, Athens wise, Those bands which ye so laboured to improve? Which tamed the savage world to your divine commands? He died of a putrid fever on 23rd June 1770, and was buried in the parish church of St. James's, Westminster. By carrying didactic poetry from the objects of Nature into the recesses of the human mind, Akenside showed an inclination to remove the art from its native regions into the territories of metaphysic. Poetry of any kind must deal with the images suggested by objects, actions, and passions, rather than with the analysis of causes; and, in all classical didactic poems, the finest passages are descriptive, satiric, or rhetorical. But Aken side's design was mainly philosophical. He describes it, thus: The design of the following poem is to give a view of these [i.e. the Pleasures of the Imagination] in the largest acceptation of the term, so that whatever our imagination feels from the agreeable appearances of nature, and all the various entertainments we meet with, either in poetry, painting, music, or any of the elegant arts, might be deducible from one or other of those principles in the constitution of the human mind which are here established and explained. It is a significant fact that, in his later years, Akenside's sense of what was poetical in his subject was more and more oppressed by his philosophy. When first published, The Pleasures of Imagination consisted of three books, of which the first treated the sources of imagination; the second described the character of its pleasures; the third dealt more particularly with the operations of art. The structure of the poem was somewhat piecemeal, as might be expected from the author's youth; the theory of Addison in his essays on the imagination being joined with the Deistical speculations of Shaftesbury's Charac |