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.
On glory's field with well-trained armies vied,
Why shall they now renounce that generous praise?
Why dread the foreign mercenary's pride?

Though Valois braved young Edward's gentle hand,
And Albert's rushed on Henry's way-worn band,
With Europe's chosen sons in arms renowned,

Yet not on Vere's bold archers long they looked,

Nor Audley's squires, nor Mowbray's yeomen brooked: They saw their standard fall, and left their monarch bound. 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,
Ye first of mortals, with the blest enrolled,
Say, did not horror in your bosoms rise,
When thus, by impious vanity impelled,
A magistrate, a monarch, ye beheld
Affronting civil order's holiest bands?

Those bands which ye so laboured to improve?

Those hopes and fears of justice from above,

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 Akenside's design was mainly philosophical.

thus:

He describes it

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

teristics and Hutcheson's Enquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Though, in its first form, there was a marked absence of those episodes and digressions, artfully inserted, which give the charm of variety to The Seasons, the poem had then an impulse, an ardour of personal enthusiasm, and a decorative fancy, which revealed the inspiration of genius. In later years, as his powers of thought matured, Akenside became dissatisfied with his work, and he recast it entirely, making the theory more regular, and removing what was fanciful and ornamental. Johnson says of the reformed poem: "He seems somewhat to have contracted his diffusion, but I know not whether he has gained in closeness what he has lost in splendour"; and this sentence is just, for though the general system is made more coherent, it is not more interesting, and the preserved passages of the early version have lost in the revised context much of their youthful life and heat. Whoever desires to make the acquaintance of this poet should study The Pleasures of Imagination as it first appeared.

In Akenside the genius of the Classical Renaissance in England is seen in its last development, and tending to an abstract form of expression. His mixed Stoicism and Humanism is reflected in the following characteristic panegyric of ancient philosophy:

O let not us,

Lulled by luxurious pleasure's languid strain,
Or crouching to the frowns of bigot rage,

O let us not a moment pause to join

That god-like band. And if the gracious power,
Who first awakened my untutored song,

Will to my invocation breathe anew

The tuneful spirit; then through all our paths

Ne'er shall the sound of this devoted lyre

Be wanting, whether on the rosy mead,

When summer smiles, to warn the melting heart

Of luxury's allurement; whether, firm

Against the torrent and the stubborn hill,

To urge bold Virtue's unremitted nerve,

And wake the strong divinity of soul,

That conquers chance and fate; or whether struck
For sounds of triumph, to proclaim her toils

Upon the lofty summit, round her brow

To twine the wreath of incorruptive praise;

To trace her hallowed light through future worlds,
And bless heaven's image in the heart of man.

The foregoing passage does not appear in the second version, but what follows is expanded, without being improved, in the re-cast:

Genius of ancient Greece! whose faithful steps
Well-pleased I follow through the sacred paths
Of nature and of science, nurse divine
Of all heroic deeds and fair desires!
O! let the breath of thy extended praise
Inspire my kindling bosom to the height
Of this untempted theme. Nor be my thoughts
Presumptuous counted, if amid the calm
That soothes this vernal evening into smiles,
I steal impatient from the sordid haunts
Of strife and low ambition, to attend
Thy sacred presence in the sylvan shade,
By their malignant footsteps ne'er profaned.
Descend, propitious! to my favoured eye
Such in thy mien, thy warm exalted air,
As when the Persian tyrant, foiled and stung
With shame and desperation, gnashed his teeth
To see thee rend the pageants of his throne ;
And at the lightning of thy lifted spear

Crouched like a slave. Bring all thy martial spoils,
Thy palms, thy laurels, thy triumphal songs,

Thy smiling band of arts, thy god-like fires

Of civil wisdom, thy heroic youth,

Warm from the schools of glory.

Guide my way

Through fair Lyceum's walk, the green retreats

Of Academus, and the thymny vale,

Where, oft enchanted with Socratic sounds,
Ilissus pure devolved his tuneful stream

In gentler murmurs. From the blooming store
Of these auspicious fields may I, unblamed,
Transplant some living blossoms to adorn
My native clime: while, far above the flight

Of fancy's plume aspiring, I unlock

The springs of ancient wisdom! while I join

Thy name, thrice honoured! with the immortal praise

Of nature, while to my compatriot youth

I point the high example of thy sons,
And tune to Attic themes the British lyre.

The cultivation of the classical style, which everywhere accompanied the development of the Renaissance on its civil side, is sufficiently illustrated in these passages. Johnson says of Akenside's manner :

His diction is certainly poetical, as it is not prosaic, and elegant, as it is not vulgar. He is to be commended as having fewer artifices of disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song. 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 us how "planets absolve the stated round of time." 1

Partisan prejudice against Whiggery, dissent, and blank verse, struggling with a sense of justice, here amusingly result in one of those negative appreciations which are so characteristic of Johnson's criticism. The judgment, nevertheless, is by no means unfair. The style of Akenside is plainly an offshoot of the Miltonic mode of blank verse, which he imitates mainly in the variety of his pauses, abstaining, as a rule, from the Latin constructions and inversions in Paradise Lost, which Thomson multiplied in The Seasons. A classical severity and simplicity characterises the versification of The Pleasures of Imagination, suited to the masculine cast of its philosophic thought, but somewhat trying to the reader, who often longs for green oases of fancy and luxuriant rills of description by which to repose himself in his arid journey. The austere course of imaginative reflection seems to anticipate the style of Wordsworth's Excursion, and lies midway between the florid Latinism of Thomson and the avoidance of "poetic diction characteristic of the Lake poet. Johnson, who judged all kinds of blank verse, as one who had cultivated the colloquial idiom, refined in the heroic couplet, could not bring himself to more than negative praise of the metre in The Pleasures of Imagination, which, however, contains many passages of pure and noble English. Nor is he

1 Lives of the Poets: Akenside.