HAVING always esteemed the PLEASURES OF IMAGINATION the finest didactic Poem in our language, it was with no small pleasure, that I accidentally discovered, some time since, a few MS. notes of AKENSIDE at the British Museum. These notes are not very important; but they led me to regret,-as, indeed, I had often done before,—that all the accounts, we have, of this great poet, should be so meagre and deficient and having formerly known two gentlemen, who had been intimately acquainted with him, I combined what I had heard them say of him with what was already known; and taking his works for a general guide (and few speak more in their works than Akenside does)-I have, I hope, been enabled to give a correct and, perhaps, not altogether an uninteresting outline of a virtuous and high-minded man, gifted with very considerable poetical powers. The Reader will not expect me to give more than it was possible to obtain. I hope, he will rather thank me for what little I have been able to collect of this eminent person; though I cannot but feel, that he must greatly regret, that the subject did not fall into abler hands. London. January, 1832 ERRATA. Page 186, 6 lines from bottom, dele Bowles. 192, 4 lines from bottom, for Edward, read Edmund. ON THE LIFE, WRITINGS, AND GENIUS OF AKENSIDE. MARK AKENSIDE* was born at Newcastle-uponTyne, in the county of Northumberland, on the 9th of November, 1721. His father was a respectable butcher. His mother's name was Mary Lumsden. They were both exceedingly strict in their religious observances; and being in the habit of attending a meeting-house, which had been then recently erected in Hanover-square, their son was • In all the editions of this poet, since the sixth published by Dodsley, 1763, the name has been invariably spelt AKENSIDE; but in the first edition of the Ode to the Earl of Huntingdon, the orthography is Akinside, and the poet himself, in his MS. dedication to Mr. Dyson (now first published) subscribes his name in the same manner. B baptized by the minister, (the Rev. Benjamin Bennet,) about three weeks afterwards. Akenside is said to have been, in after life, very much ashamed of the comparative lowness of his birth; and it is, also, reported, that he could never regard a lameness, which impeded his walking with facility, otherwise than as an unpleasant memento of a cut on the foot, which he received from the fall of one of his father's cleavers, when about seven years of age. Be this as it may, it is very certain that he had a strong regard for the place of his birth;-and even so late as the year in which he died, (1770) he wrote some beautiful lines, commemorative of the pleasure, he was accustomed to receive, in early life, from wandering among the scenes of his native river. "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, No accounts have reached us, as to the number of brothers and sisters he had: we only know, from Brand's Observations on Popular Antiquities, that he knew one of Akenside's sisters, whose name was Addison, then living in Newcastle; and that she possessed several drawings, her brother had sketched at a very early period of life. His parents having separated from the church, Akenside, after some preparatory instruction at the free-school of Newcastle, was placed under the care of a dissenting minister,-Mr. Wilson,-who kept a private academy in the same town; by whom his mind was early awakened to those impressions, which seldom fail "To render Nature pleasing to the eye, And music to the ear *; And that he was as feelingly alive to that most delightful of all suffrages,—the applause of the wise and good,-is evident from his Ode on the Love of Praise; than which Horace himself has scarcely one more beautiful. I. "Of all the springs within the mind, Which prompt her steps in Fortune's maze, From none more pleasing aid we find, Than from the genuine love of praise. Pleasures of Imagination, b. iii. 492. |