dually 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 play-thing 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 an acute observer, who had looked on the tranfactions of the medical world for half a century, a very curious book might be written on the Fortune of Physicians.

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 oftentation of elegance and literature.

His Discourse on the Dysentery (1764) was confidered as a very confpicuous specimen of Latinity, which entitled him to the fame 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.

AKENSIDE is to be confidered 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 afterwards 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.

1

With the philofophical or religious tenets of the author I have nothing to do; my bufiness is with his poetry. The subject is well-chofen, 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 illuftrations, and it is not easy in such exuberance of matter to find the middle point between penury and fatiety. The parts seem artificially difpofed, with fufficient coherence, so as that they cannot change their places without injury to the general design..

His images are displayed with fuch luxuriance of expreffion, that they are hidden, like Butler's Moon, by a Veil of Light; they are forms fantastically loft under superfluity of dress. Pars minima eft ipfa Puella fui. The words are multiplied till the sense is hardly perceived; attention deferts the mind, and fettles in the ear. The reader wanders

through the gay diffufion, fometimes amazed, and sometimes delighted; but, after many turnings in the flowery labyrinth, comes out

as

as he went in. He remarked little, and laid hold on nothing.

To his verfification justice requires that praise should not be denied. In the general fabrication of his lines he is perhaps fuperior 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 fufficient frequency. The sense is carried on through a long intertexture of complicated clauses, and as nothing is diftinguished, nothing is remembered.

The exemption which blank verse affords from the neceffity of clofing the sense with the couplet, betrays luxuriant and active minds into fuch self-indulgence, that they pile image upon image, ornament upon ornament, and are not eafily perfuaded 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 profaick, and elegant as it is not vulgar.

He

He is to be commended as having fewer artifices of disgust than most of his brethren of the blank fong. 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 abfolve 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 defign. 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 fomewhat contracted his diffufion; but I know not whether he has gained in closeness what he has loft in splendor. In the additional book, the Tale of Solon is too long.

One great defect of his poem is very properly cenfured by Mr. Walker, unless it may be said in his defence, that what he has omitted