ore, equally contemptible.

In the revisal of his poem, though he died before he had finished it,
he omitted the lines which had given occasion to Warburton's objections.

He published, soon after his return from Levden, 1745, his first
collection of odes; and was impelled, by his rage of patriotism, to
write a very acrimonious epistle to Pulteney, whom he stigmatizes, under
the name of Curio, as the betrayer of his country.

Being now to live by his profession, he first commenced physician at
Northampton, where Dr. Stonehouse then practised with such reputation
and success, that a stranger was not likely to gain ground upon him.
Akenside tried the contest awhile; and, having deafened the place with
clamours for liberty, removed to Hampstead, where he resided more than
two years, and then fixed himself in London, the proper place for a man
of accomplishments like his.

At London he was known as a poet, but was still to make his way as a
physician; and would, perhaps, have been reduced to great exigencies,
but that Mr. Dyson, with an ardour of friendship that has not many
examples, allowed him three hundred pounds a year. Thus supported, he
advanced gradually in medical reputation, but never attained any great
extent of practice, or eminence of popularity. A physician in a great
city seems to be the mere plaything of fortune; his degree of reputation
is, for the most part, totally casual; they that employ him know not his
excellence; they that reject him know not his deficience. By any acute
observer, who had looked on the transactions of the medical world for
half a century, a very curious book might be written on the Fortune of
Physicians[195]

Akenside appears not to have been wanting to his own success: he placed
himself in view by all the common methods; he became a fellow of the
Royal Society; he obtained a degree at Cambridge; and was admitted into
the College of Physicians; he wrote little poetry, but published, from
time to time, medical essays and observations; he became physician to
St. Thomas's hospital; he read the Gulstonian lectures in anatomy; but
began to give, for the Crounian lecture, a history of the revival of
learning, from which he soon desisted; and, in conversation, he very
eagerly forced himself into notice by an ambitious ostentation of
elegance and literature.

His Discourse on the Dysentery, 1764, was considered as a very
conspicuous specimen of Latinity, which entitled him to the same