AKENSIDE, MARK English poet and phys ician, was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne. He was the son of a butcher, and was slightly lame all his life from a wound he re ceived as a child from his father's cleaver. He was sent to Edinburgh to study theology with a view to becoming a minis ter, but in fact studied medicine, and seems to have drifted to a mild deism. His politics, says Dr. Johnson, were characterized by an "impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very little care what shall be established," and he is caricatured in the republican doctor of Smollett's Peregrine Pickle. He had already acquired a considerable literary reputation when he came to Lon don, about the end of 1743, and offered his Pleasures of the Imagination to Dodsley for f 120. Dodsley thought the price ex orbitant, and only accepted the terms after submitting the ms. to Pope, who assured him that this was "no everyday writer." The three books of this poem appeared in Jan. 1744. It was trans lated eventually into German, French and Italian, and gained a general success.
Akenside had taken a medical degree at Leyden and then tried to establish himself in medical practice at Hampstead. His life long friend, Jeremiah Dyson, took a house there, and did all he could to further his friend's interest in the neighbourhood; but Akenside's arrogance and pedantry frustrated these efforts, and Dyson then took a house for him in Bloomsbury square, making him independent of his profession by an allowance which enabled him to "keep a chariot," and to live "incomparably well." In 1746 he wrote his much-praised "Hymn to the Naiads," and began to contribute to Dodsley's Museum, or Literary and Historical Register. He was now 25 years old and began to devote himself almost exclusively to his profession. He was an acute and learned physician. In Jan. 1759 he was appointed assistant physician, and two months later principal physician to Christ's Hospital, but he was charged with harsh treatment of the poorer patients. At the accession of George III. both Dyson and Akenside changed their political opinions, and Akenside's conversion to Tory principles was rewarded by the appointment of physician to the queen. Dyson became secretary to the Treasury, lord of the Treasury, and in 1774 privy councillor and cofferer to the household.
Akenside died on June 23, 177o, at his house in Burlington street, where the last ten years of his life had been spent. He left all his effects and his literary remains to Dyson, who issued an edition of his Poems in 17 7 2. This included the revised version of the Pleasures of Imagination on which the author was engaged at his death. The ideas embodied in this work were largely borrowed from Addison's essays on the imagination and from Lord Shaftes bury. Professor Dowden complains that "his tone is too high pitched ; his ideas are too much in the air; they do not nourish themselves in the common heart, the common life of man." Dr. Johnson praised the blank verse of the poems, but found fault with the long and complicated periods. The odes are dignified and often musical, while the few "inscriptions" are felicitous in the extreme.
See Dyce's Life of Akenside prefixed to his edition of the Poetical Works (1835) ; also Johnson's Lives of the Poets, and C. Bucke, Life Writings and Genius of Akenside (1832).