e 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 physic, 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, with very little care what shall be established.

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 a 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."

In 1741 he went to Leyden in pursuit of medical knowledge; and three
years afterwards (May 16, 1744) became Doctor of Physic, having,
according to the custom of the Dutch Universities, published a thesis or
dissertation. The subject which he chose was "The Original and Growth
of the Human Foetus;" in which he is said to have departed, with great
judgment, from the opinion then established, and to have delivered that
which has been since confirmed and received.

Akenside was a young man, warm with every notion that by nature or
accident had been connected with the sound of liberty, and, by an
eccentricity which such dispositions do not easily avoi