red it to
want no recommendation that dress could give it. His conversation was
elegant and easy. The rest of his character may, without injury to his
memory, sink into silence.

As a writer he cannot be placed in any high class. There is no species
of composition in which he was eminent. His dramas had their day, a
short day, and are forgotten: his blank verse seems, to my ear, the echo
of Thomson. His Life 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 publick, 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 topicks of conversation and other modes of amusement.

-----

[Footnote 193: Mallet's William and Margaret was printed in Aaron Hill's
Plain Dealer, No. 36, July 24,1724 In its original state it was very
different from what it is in the last edition of his works. Dr. J.]

[Footnote 194: See note on this passage of Pope's life in the present
edition.]

AKENSIDE.

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 grammar-school 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 physick, and
repaid that contribution, which, being received for a different purpose,
he justly thought it dishonourable to retain.

Whether, when he resolved not to be a dissenting minister, he ceased to
be a dissenter, I know not. He certainly retained 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 impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, wi