was constantly brought to his recollection by a lameness, originating in a cut on his foot from the fall of his father's cleaver, when he was about seven years old.1

After receiving some instruction at the freeschool of Newcastle, he was sent to a private academy in the same town, kept by a Mr. Wilson, a dissenting minister.

His genius and his love of poetry were manifested, while he was yet a school-boy. The Gentleman's Magazine for April, 1737, contains one of his earliest attempts at versification, entitled "The Virtuoso, in imitation of Spenser's style and stanza:"2 it is far superior to the sing-song inanities which in those days generally adorned the pages of that miscellany, and is prefaced thus by a letter to the editor:

"Newcastle-upon-Tyne, April 23. "I hope, Sir, you'll excuse the following Poem (being the performance of one in his sixteenth year), and insert it in your next Magazine, which will oblige, Yours, &c.

"MARCUS."

To the same popular work he contributed, in the next month, an ingenious fable called "Ambition

1 Brand's Obs. on Pop. Antiq. 114, ed. 1777.

2 Gent. Mag. vii. 244.- Mr. Bucke thinks it was suggested by a passage in Shaftesbury's Characteristics, iii. 156, ed. 1737. - L'je of Akenside, 5.

and Content; and, in July following, "The Poet, a Rhapsody."2

When about the age of seventeen, Akenside used to visit some relations at Morpeth, where it has been rather hastily supposed that he wrote his "Pleasures of Imagination."3 Passages of it were probably composed there: at various times and places, during several years before its publication, that great work had, no doubt, occupied his mind. In a fragment of the fourth book of the remodelled copy, he pleasingly describes his early sensibility to the beauties of nature, and his lonely wanderings in the vicinity both of Newcastle and of Morpeth:

"O ye dales

Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands, where
Oft as the giant flood obliquely strides,
And his banks open, and his lawns extend,
Stops short the pleased traveller to view,
Presiding o'er the scene some rustic tower
Founded by Norman or by Saxon hands;
O ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook
The rocky pavement and the mossy falls
Of solitary Wensbeck's limpid stream;
How gladly I recall your well known seats
Belov'd of old, and that delightful time
When all alone, for many a summer's day,
I wander'd through your calm recesses, led
In silence by some powerful hand unseen."

To the Gentleman's Magazine for August, 1738,* he communicated "A British Philippie, occasioned

1 Gent. Mag. vii. 309. 2 Ibid. vii. 441. 8 Biog. Brit. 4 viii. 427, where it is signed " Britannicus."

by the insults of the Spaniards, and the present preparations for war." That its flaming patriotism was quite to the taste of Mr. Urban, appears from the following advertisement :

"N. B. It often turning to our Inconvenience to sell a greater Number of one Magazine than of another, and believing the above noble-spirited Poem will be acceptable to many, not our constant Readers, we have printed it in Folio, Price Six Pence, together with the Motto at large, for which, receiving the Manuscript late, we could not make room. And if the ingenious Author will inform us how we may direct a Packet to his Hands, we will send him our Acknowledgments for so great a Favour, with a Parcel of the Folio Edition."

His "Hymn to Science" was printed in the Gentleman's Magazine for October, 1739.1 It is

1 ix. 544, where it is dated "Newcastle-upon-Tyne." Mr. Bucke, not aware of this, supposes that it was written at Edinburgh. He pronounces it to be "worthy the lyre of Collins," to whose imaginative odes it bears no resemblance, and, after quoting the two following stanzas, exclaims, "Has Horace or Gray any thing superior to this?" I confidently answer,many things infinitely superior:

"That last best effort of thy skill,
To form the life and rule the will,
Propitious Power! impart:
Teach me to cool my passion's fires,
Make me the judge of my desires,
The master of my heart.

"Raise me above the vulgar's breath,
Pursuit of fortune, fear of death,
And all in life that's mean.
Still true to reason be my plan,
Still let my actions speak the man,
Through every various scene.

Life of Akenside, 19.

doubtless a production of considerable merit; but Mr. Bucke is probably the only reader whom it ever moved to rapturous admiration.

Our poet was about eighteen years of age when he was sent to Edinburgh, with some pecuniary assistance from the Dissenters' Society, that he might qualify himself for the office of one of their ministers; but, after pursuing the requisite studies for one winter, he changed his mind with respect to a profession, entered himself a medical student,1 and repaid the contribution which he had received from the Dissenters. "Whether," says Johnson, "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

In the same volume of the Gentleman's Magazine, p. 153, is an imitation of Horace, Ode I. B. iii., signed “M. A." Qy. Is it by Akenside?

When the "Pleasures of Imagination" appeared, the editor of the Gent. Mag. gave an extract from that poem, headed by an announcement that it was written by the author of the "British Philippic" and the "Hymn to Science," xiv. 219. Both pieces were reprinted in the third vol. of Pearch's Coll. of Poems.

1 In a letter written from Newcastle in 1742 (which will be afterwards given), he calls himself "Surgeon."

and anarchy, an impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very little care what shall be established."1

At Edinburgh he was elected a member of the Medical Society, December 30th, 1740,2 and became acquainted with several persons of his own age, who afterwards rose to eminence; but though, during his residence there, he prosecuted the study of medicine, we learn from the following authentic statement that he was by no means satisfied with his new profession, and thirsted for a celebrity very different from that which its most successful practice could confer. 66 Akenside," says the late Dugald Stewart, "when a student at Edinburgh, was a member of the Medical Society, then recently formed, and was eminently distinguished by the eloquence which he displayed in the course of the debates. Dr. Robertson (who was at that time a student of divinity in the same university) told me that he was frequently led to attend their meetings, chiefly to hear the speeches of Akenside, the great object of whose ambition then was a seat in Parlia ment; a situation which, he was sanguine enough to flatter himself, he had some prospect of obtaining, and for which he conceived his talents to be

1 Life of Akenside.

2 Anderson's Life of Akenside.—- Brit. Poets, ix. 725.

8 Mr. Bucke says that Akenside "seems to have made great progress" in his medical studies at Edinburgh (Life of Akenside, 16); and, in quoting from Stewart the passage which I have given above, he omits the concluding sentence.