to study for the Presbyterian ministry. A year
later he gave up theology for medicine--honorably repaying the money
advanced for his divinity studies, if obviously out of some one's
else pocket.

After some struggle in provincial towns, his immense literary
reputation--for at twenty-four he was a star of the first magnitude in
Great Britain--and the generosity of a friend enabled him to acquire a
fashionable London practice. He wrote medical treatises which at the
time made him a leader in his profession, secured a rich clientage, and
prospered greatly. In 1759 he was made physician to Christ's Hospital,
where, however valued professionally, he is charged with being brutal
and offensive to the poor; with indulging his fastidiousness, temper,
and pomposity, and with forgetting that he owed anything to mere duty
or humanity.

Unfortunately, too, Akenside availed himself of that mixture of
complaisance and arrogance by which almost alone a man of no birth can
rise in a society graded by birth. He concealed his origin and was
ashamed of his pedigree. But the blame for his flunkeyism belongs,
perhaps, less to him than to the insolent caste feeling of society,
which forced it on him as a measure of self-defense and of advancement.
He wanted money, loved place and selfish comfort, and his nature did not
balk at the means of getting them,--including living on a friend when he
did not need such help. To become physician to the Queen, he turned his
coat from Whig to Tory; but no one familiar with the politics of the
time will regard this as an unusual offense. It must also be remembered
that Akenside possessed a delicate constitution, keen senses, and
irritable nerves; and that he was a parvenu, lacking the power of
self-control even among strangers. These traits explain, though they do
not excuse, his bad temper to the unclean and disagreeable patients of
the hospital, and they mitigate the fact that his industry was paralyzed
by material prosperity, and his self-culture interfered with by conceit.
His early and sweeping success injured him as many a greater man has
been thus injured.

Moreover, his temper was probably soured by secret bitternesses. His
health, his nerves, an entire absence of the sense of humor, and his
lack of repartee, made him shun like Pope and Horace Walpole the
bibulous and gluttonous element of eighteenth-century British society.
For its brutal horseplay and uncivil practical joking which passed for