Pope
preceded him, and Thomson renewed its popularity by being the first to
use it in a poem of real merit, 'The Castle of Indolence.' Mr. Gosse
calls the 'Hymn to the Naiads' "beautiful,"--"of transcendent
merit,"--"perhaps the most elegant of his productions." The 'Epistle to
Curio,' however, must be held his best poem,--doubtless because it is
the only one which came from his heart; and even its merit is much more
in rhetorical energy than in art or beauty. As to its allusion and
object, the real and classic Curio of Roman social history was a protege
of Cicero's, a rich young Senator, who began as a champion of liberty
and then sold himself to Caesar to pay his debts. In Akenside's poem,
Curio represents William Pulteney, Walpole's antagonist, the hope of
that younger generation who hated Walpole's system of parliamentary
corruption and official jobbing. This party had looked to Pulteney for
a clean and public-spirited administration. Their hero was carried to a
brief triumph on the wave of their enthusiasm. But Pulteney disappointed
them bitterly: he took a peerage, and sunk into utter and permanent
political damnation, with no choice but Walpole's methods and tools, no
policy save Walpole's to redeem the withdrawal of so much lofty promise,
and no aims but personal advancement. From Akenside's address to him,
the famous 'Epistle to Curio,' a citation is made below. Akenside's
fame, however, rests on the 'Pleasures of the Imagination.' He began it
at seventeen; though in the case of works begun in childhood, it is
safer to accept the date of finishing as the year of the real
composition. He published it six years later, in 1744, on the advice and
with the warm admiration of Pope, a man never wasteful of encomiums on
the poetry of his contemporaries. It raised its author to immediate
fame. It secures him a place among the accepted English classics still.
Yet neither its thought nor its style makes the omission to read it any
irreparable loss. It is cultivated rhetoric rather than true poetry. Its
chief merit and highest usefulness are that it suggested two far
superior poems, Campbell's 'Pleasures of Hope' and Rogers's 'Pleasures
of Memory.' It is the relationship to these that really keeps
Akenside's alive.

In scope, the poem consists of two thousand lines of blank verse. It is
distributed in three books. The first defines the sources, methods, and
results of imagination; the second its distinction from philosophy