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of Bacon' is known as it is appended to Bacon's volumes, but is no longer mentioned. His works are such as a writer, bustling in the world, showing himself in public, and emerging occasionally from time to time into notice, might keep alive by his personal influence; but which, conveying little information and giving no great pleasure, must soon give way, as the succession of things produces new topics of conversation and other modes of amusement.3 30

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Mallet had talents enough to keep his literary reputation alive as long as he himself lived; and that, let me tell you, is a good deal.”—JOHNSON: Boswell by Croker, p. 257.

If Johnson had been fond of ballads, he could have said a word in favour of Mallet's Edwin and Emma,' 1760 (4to. Baskerville); but Johnson did not care for ballads. In his Life of Tickell' he is silent about Colin and Lucy.'

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MARK AKENSIDE.

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Educated at Edinburgh and Leyden -
Publishes The Pleasures of Imagina-
Writes a Poem against Pul-

tion' His Quarrel with Warburton

teney Publishes a volume of Odes - Mr. Dyson's friendship for him

His small practice as a physician

Church, Piccadilly, London.

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MARK AKENSIDE was born on the 9th of November, 1721, at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His father Mark was a butcher, of the Presbyterian sect; his mother's name was Mary Lumsden.' He received the first part of his education at the grammarschool of Newcastle, and was afterwards instructed by Mr. Wilson, who kept a private academy.

At the age of eighteen he was sent to Edinburgh, that he might qualify himself for the office of a dissenting minister, and received some assistance from the fund which the Dissenters employ in educating young men of scanty fortune. But a wider view of the world opened other scenes and prompted other hopes he determined to study physic, and repaid that contribution, which, being received for a different purpose, he justly thought it dishonourable to retain.

a dissenting minister, He certainly retained

Whether, when he resolved not to be he ceased to be a Dissenter, I know not. 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 and anarchy, an

"1710, August 10.- Mark Akenside and Mary Lumsden. Mar."- Register of St. Nicholas, Newcastle. ('Biographical Notice of Akenside,' by Robert White, p. 1.) His father wrote his name Akinside, and so did his son till he became distinguished.

impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very little care what shall be established.2

Akenside was one of those poets who have felt very early the motions of genius, and one of those students who have very early stored their memories with sentiments and images. Many of his performances were produced in his youth; and his greatest work, The Pleasures of Imagination,' appeared in 1744. I have heard Dodsley, by whom it was published, relate, that when the copy was offered him, the price demanded for it, which was an hundred and twenty pounds, being such as he was not inclined to give precipitately, he carried the work to Pope, who, having looked into it, advised him not to make a niggardly offer, for "this was no every-day writer."

2 Akenside, 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 Parliament; 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 much better adapted than for the profession he had chosen. In this opinion he was probably in the right, as he was generally considered by his fellow-students as far inferior in medical science to several of his companions.-DUGALD STEWART: Elem. of the Phil. of the Human Mind, iii. 501.

3 He was very young when he became a poet in print, many of his boyish verses appearing in the pages of 'The Gentleman's Magazine.' One of his first attempts is in the number of that periodical for April, 1737, and is called 'The Virtuoso, in imitation of Spenser's Style and Stanza.' The letter with which it was sent, signed "Marcus," pleads excuse for its defects, as the performance of one in his sixteenth year." This is not a common poem; but it is very unlike the style, though written in the stanza, of Spenser.

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Akenside's next communication was in the August of 1738; A British Philippic, occasioned by the Insults of the Spaniards, and the present Preparations for War.' This noble-spirited poem, as it is called by Sylvanus Urban, is too near an echo of the Britannia' of Thomson; but it is no everyday cento; and so it was thought by Cave, who printed it at the same time in a sixpenny folio. "If the ingenious author," says Cave, "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."

The poem appeared anonymously; and a scribbler of the name of Rolt went over to Dublin, published an edition of it as his own work, and lived for some months at the best tables on the fame which it brought him. (See Boswell by Croker, p. 121.) Akenside vindicated his right by publishing an

edition with his name.

What was thought of the new poet and his poem by some men of genius

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